Work on Joe's Blog

Conferences and committees

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

2019

Programme Committee, PIDapalooza 2019
Programme Committee, Wiki Workshop at The Web Conference
Committee, 5:AM Altmetrics Conference
Keynote talk, Metrics in Transition Workshop 2019. “The role of open scholoarly infrastructure in metrics”
Talk, PIDapalooza 2019

2018

Programme Committee, PIDapalooza 2018.
Talk, PIDapalooza 2018.
Talk, altmetrics17 workshop.

2017

Talk, 4:AM Altmetrics Conference.
Talk, altmetrics18 workshop.

2016

Talk, 3:AM Altmetrics Conference
Talk, csv,conf,v2

Five principles for community altmetrics data

Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I presented these ideas at the altmetrics18 workshop. You can read a slightly more formal version of this blog post here.

These five principles are my answer to some of the difficulties and problems I have observed in the past couple of years. In that time I have been collecting the kind of data that altmetrics are built from, and talking and working with researchers. Altmetrics data is derived from the community. I think that community should continue to be at the heart of every step.

Some thoughts on 'General discussion of data quality challenges in social media metrics'

Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Zohreh Zahedi and Rodrigo Costas recently published a comparison of altmetrics data providers. Included in the comparison was Crossef Event Data, the service that I have been designing and building for the last couple of years. I am writing this blog post as a personal response to their study, “General discussion of data quality challenges in social media metrics: Extensive comparison of four major altmetric data aggregators”. We will also publish an official Crossref response, which I will link to when it is published.

Conferences in 2016

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 00:00:55 +0000

I sometimes to go to conferences. Sometimes I talk. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes both.

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://www.crossref.org/annualmeeting/index.html">Crossref LIVE</a><br>
      London, November 2016</td>
  <td>The Crossref annual meeting.</td>
  <td>To catch up with Crossref members and the scholarly publishing community.</td>
  <td>Not speaking (unless spoken to). Showing what the Strategic Initiatives team (that's Crossref Labs to you) are up to.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://altmetricsconference.com/category/3am-bucharest/">3:AM Conference</a><br>
      Bucharest, September 2016</td>
  <td>Discussing alternative metrics for assessing published research.</td>
  <td>To talk to researchers, funders and infrastructure providers about Crossref Event Data</td>
  <td>We need neutral infrastructure to collect data on how research is used and mentioned online. Here's what Crossref's doing.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics16/">altmetrics16 Workshop</a><br>
      Bucharest, September 2016</td>
  <td>Sharing research and research methods for alternative metrics.</td>
  <td>To talk to researchers, and share and understand expectations and techniques.</td>
  <td>Transparency is important when producing the data that underpins alternative metrics. Here are the transparency principles of Crossref Event Data.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2016">WikiCite 2016</a><br>
      Berlin, March 2016</td>
  <td>Talking about how people cite things in Wikipedia and how to improve it.</td>
  <td>Lots of citations on Wikipedia are made using DOIs. </td>
  <td>Here's how much use they get.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://csvconf.com/">csv,conf,2016</a><br>
      Berlin, March 2016</td>
  <td>Talking about data, both structured and unstructured.</td>
  <td>To talk about data!</td>
  <td>Here's how we collaborated with Wikipedia to improve DOI use. Here's what happened.</td>
</tr>

What?	What??	Why?	What did/will I say?
PIDAPalooza Reykjavík, November 2016	Discussing persistent identifiers for research objects.	To share experience and best practice about the use of persistent identifiers.	It's difficult when people don't use PIDs to talk about things that have them. I still have to look for them. Here's how.

Another Year

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:55 +0000

I think that summer is a far better host to ‘new year’ than winter. If you’re lucky enough to be able to take time out to enjoy it, it offers a chance to stop whatever you were stuck doing for a little while and think about it. A reset, and chance to look backward on the last year and forward on the next. For me, winter is all about hard work, when everything’s an effort. Hardly the time to stop and think. I’d much rather do that basking under the sun than huddled round a fire.

Unit Testing in Go: talk at Oxford Geek Night

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 22:25:49 +0000

Download the slides for the ‘Unit Testing in Go’, a microslot (exactly 5 minutes!) at Oxford Geek Nights 29 on the 21st November.

IndexError 'list index out of range' in Django Admin

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:12:58 +0000

Have you just got an exception from Django saying:

IndexError at /admin/mything/

list index out of range

Peacock Experts — video

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 07:26:05 +0000

One of the great things about my workplace is that

we have unlimited peacocks at our disposal
a number of my colleagues are qualified peacock-ologists

Here’s a short video of just one of the peacocks, along with some commentary about their feeding habits and behavioural characteristics (something about baked beans, pretending to be a bike and the thing from Jurassic Park, I don’t know it went over my head).

Don’t worry about the noise at the end, it’s just a peacock alarm (or indeed a peacock alarmed).

Aeropress explosion (and copycat Gaggia)

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:17:29 +0000

Respect the aeropress. If you don’t pay it enough respect it will explode, sending coffee EVERYWHERE.

STOP PRESS

Not wishing to be outdone, the Gaggia espresso machine had a go too. I should add that this happened to a colleague.

Trouble with local cross-domain Django cookies

Tue, 29 May 2012 23:44:55 +0000

I’m working on a Django app which is able to serve content on a number of subdomains. The app has a number of sites, which appear as subdomains of the main domain. There’s some middleware to look things up from the request and do the right routing.

In the wild the subdomains will be done with DNS, but for local development, I’m creating entries in my /etc/hosts such as demosite.local, using .local as my ‘main domain’ locally. After a colleague integrated some authentication code, I suddenly found I couldn’t log in on my development environment. It didn’t work with either the custom login screen or the Django admin. Very odd.

Using Subversion with PIP: Cannot find command 'svn'

Mon, 28 May 2012 22:31:39 +0000

Came across this when deploying a Django app to a fresh VM, installing with Python PIP from a requirements file.

Facebook JavaScript login doesn't work in Safari

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:23:15 +0000

I have been banging my proverbial head against a brick wall (or my actual head against a proverbial wall) for the best part of a few days, on and off, trying to find the cause of an inconsistency in behaviour between Safari and Chrome in a Facebook canvas app.

GET parameters in Facebook Canvas applications

Wed, 09 May 2012 10:23:18 +0000

I’m developing a Facebook app at work and was stuck on an issue for a bit. This post is just a mental note, and to prevent this happening.

Crazy high CPU usage on Snow Leopard and a surprising culprit

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:21:59 +0000

After coming back from a team-building trip, I started to notice things were going a bit slow on my work laptop. I took it with me for casual emailing and working on the train, but spent about 4 days not really using it and certainly not ‘working’ on it. It came out once to display the lyrics to a song about Pithivier, and once to check emails, but that was about it.

Crazy idea: Hold music cadence machine

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:22:41 +0000

I’ve just been on a call with a client. They have Strauss or somesuch a hold music. Orchestral waltzes. The person on the other end picked up exactly at the end of a phrase. It was perfect.

My idea:

On-hold music programmed with meta-information that stores the exact timecodes of cadences and the end of phrases. When the person who is being waited on picks up the phone, the system keeps playing the music until the next point.

A snowy journey to work

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:32:21 +0000

I’m not normally given to taking photos of my commute, but in the case of the snow I made an exception.

In Which we Discover Some Rules About Python Scoping (which we already knew)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:00:06 +0000

I’ve just been bitten by scoping in Python. If you gave me this code and asked me what it did, I’d probably guess that it was a trick question and look carefully at it. What would you say?

def demo():
number = 100
one = number / 100

numbers = [one, one+1, one+2]
big_numbers = [number * 100 for number in numbers]
bigger_numbers = [big_number * 100 for big_number in big_numbers]
print number

The Annual Squash Balancing Ritual

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:56:50 +0000

There are few events more sought after and exclusive than the annual Balancing of the Squash. This happens in a secret location, late at night, early in November. This ritual has roots in the ancient culture of a secret society known as ’the Box of the Torch'.

Tonight the participants excelled both themselves and in some cases, each other.

It’s a legume.

Walking Home in the Dark

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:47:40 +0000

It’s that time of year again. This winter I am working for a company with offices in the middle of a country estate. To get home you have to walk through a copse and over a sheep field.

I enjoy walking in the dark immensely. I have always enjoyed it. I like to the extent that I find flashlights genuinely offensive in the dark (until you’ve dropped something). When I’m out in the dark and quiet I feel like the space that I inhabit expands a little. My own little personal bubble grows and weakens and I feel a bit more connected with everything. I am more aware of noises and movement around me in the half-light of the gloaming.

One Last Joke

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:42:20 +0000

Immediately after leaving university I joined a software company, and stayed there for 2 years and 8 months. It was serious slice of life. I’m glad I spent it there, but I’m also glad I left. Over the almost-three-years, my self-control wavered from time to time. I enjoy a joke, and if there’s a practical element, all the better.

In his goodbye speech, my manager went over the list of things I had done in my time there, including several practical jokes.