Work

This year’s theme seems to have been impermanence: The deaths of two people close to me, the shift from from boat-dwelling to house-dwelling, stepping into more challenging role at work, and the consuming joy in helping a child discover the world. A mantra I have found particularly useful is “Which part of this can I do?”

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Conferences and committees

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

They say the skies are bigger Up North. I’ve recently witnessed this natural phenomenon first-hand. It’s true. The best theory I have so far is that the sky expands, inching out and pressing down toward the horizon. Meeting abrupt and solid bedrock, it flexes and springs up, vault-like, forming a dome. As any structural engineer will tell you, this paraboloid is capable of supporting and holding back crushing weights. The arch transfers the load deep into its footing, pushing downward and outward.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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Have you just got an exception from Django saying:

IndexError at /admin/mything/

list index out of range

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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).

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