“In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode.” — Wikipedia. In the UK, we teach school kids how to calculate the mean, median, and mode in Year 6 (kids aged 10-11), it’s simple stuff.

On the 26 ^th October 2021, Springer Nature published version 1 of a (not peer-reviewed) “white paper” titled “Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals” by Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Jessica Monaghan, David Stuart, and Susie Winter.

So, what are we going to do about Facebook? It has been clear for at least five years now, or should have been, that the status quo is untenable, not least because the era of social media seems to have degraded our ability to have grown-up conversations about important problems, and one of those problems is social media itself.

There might be valid concerns about the mRNA vaccines. Then there are the clearly insane ones, such as the claims that it involves the injection of a microchip. The argument that mRNA vaccines are a form of ‘gene therapy’ are somewhere in the middle, and that makes responding to it somewhat difficult.

I was alerted to a great discussion ¹ about unifying versus partitioning data models. That is, you have some data powering some part of your system, and you need to decide how to structure that data and associate validation logic and behavior – like calculating properties or triggering other system actions – with the bundle of data as it evolves over the course of some ongoing or completing process.

There are user facilities for scientific research. They were born out of the cost of doing “big science” with hardware that was increasingly resource-intensive, in terms of physical space, personnel time, and materials. Lawrence’s first cyclotron fit in the palm of his hand. Then he needed the hills behind Berkeley’s university campus.

When writing a multiline data structure literal, the usual convention is to put delimiters like commas at the end of each line.

This is a test to see if tag-specific RSS feeds are automatically generated for each tag in a Hugo blog. The front matter for this post is: --- title: "Automatic RSS Feed for Each Tag in Hugo" date: 2021-09-03T09:33:37-04:00 draft: false tags: - test --- Woohoo! /tags/test/index.xml was automatically created on deploy!

Irving et al. ¹ approach digital research infrastructure through three related but distinct concepts: openness, reproducibility, and sustainability. Openness is about making digital resources generally accessible for reuse, sharing, and adaptation through an open license.

What do knowledge governance systems look like in practice? By knowledge governance, I don’t just mean governing ontologies. By knowledge, I mean categories/sets/types of things – what a thing “is,” or at least what it is described to be in the information system – and the relationships between these types, as opposed to specific recorded facts.