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June 2023

I probably shouldn't give this oxygen as it's predictable trolling. But oh well.

Dude's got a *Nobel prize* and still feels victimised. 🤷🏻 https://x.com/timeshighered/status/1674718223219015681

Of course, he might have had instances where, in the interests of redressing historic inequalities, he was passed over for a woman.

But again: he has a damn Nobel! What is he moaning about?

"To date, only 61 women have won the Nobel Prize compared with 898 men, with only eight female chemistry laureates."

"I have a feeling of discrimination when I am here" - man giving keynote, with Nobel prize, and 3 large laboratories worldwide.

Urgh.

Disabled people often have so many additional costs that most people don't even consider. PIP even makes it possible for some to stay in work.

This discourse of surveying worthiness based on ill-informed public opinion and fostering antagonism is grim. https://x.com/johnpringdns/status/1674456578865471488

I can't afford to wait 2 hours when the session finishes at 10pm anyway. I'd be shattered for work the next day. So, again, I pay a lot of travel costs.

I don't get PIP or any benefits to help with this - but for some people it would be unaffordable

Eg: for the past 10 months, I've had to travel to hospital in London at least once per week. Hundreds of pounds in travel fares.

I have dialysis 3x per week. Again, I have to get there. Hospital could provide transport, but warn that it could be up to 2hrs wait every time.

Some things that annoy me at conferences.

Speakers who have no regard for time and run over. Hugely disrespectful of the audience and the organization of the event. Chairs who don't stop them equally to blame.

Speakers who jokingly say they aren't an expert in the thing they then go on to speak about. If you don't know about something, why are you talking about it? Why am I wasting my time listening to idle speculation from self-confessed ignorami?

Something I'm conflicted on: should papers be read word for word at conferences? On the one hand, these are often much more considered & rigorous pieces of work. On the other hand... I could just read this myself in a fraction of the time if I had the script & then ask questions.

... and I'm now taking annual leave for a week! 🥳

I can't really go anywhere because of dialysis at the hospital, but we've got a cottage booked for a change of scene.

And @artofile has already requested that we watch a bunch of classic SF films, so it's shaping up well.

🚨Digital Preservation People!🚨

I want to make @CrossrefOrg DOIs "self-repairing" with digital preservation baked in. This would massively increase the persistence of the scholarly record.

But I need feedback on the design. Please read, RT, & comment!

https://www.crossref.org/blog/a-request-for-comment-automatic-digital-preservation-and-self-healing-dois/

How would it work? Well, on the deposit side it looks a bit like this, with the Op Cit endpoint proxying the XML to the live deposit system and the fulltext to a set of participating archives.

When you deposit in Op Cit, the resolution page will be redirected to the Op Cit resolver, instead of a direct link. Eventually, we'd like that page to automatically redirect if the original publisher version is still live, but at first it will be a landing page.

“We have to consider the impact on dampening investor appetite for UK plc and its infrastructure”

It's WATER. And these fools still want to make it a profit opportunity for overseas investors.

Thames Water in crisis talks over potential £10bn black hole
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/28/thames-water-in-crisis-talks-over-potential-10bn-black-hole-cost-possible-collapse?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

What the public wants from a water company: water and sewage disposal.

What the UK government wants: opportunities for overseas investment (asset stripping) in "UK PLC".

One of the most amusing things about dialysis - and, trust me, there aren't many - is that the machine plays a tune when you finish the session that sounds like you've just won Super Mario Brothers.

I was asked to think about AI at @CrossrefOrg and how it might help or hinder our mission. Here are some of my thoughts - good and bad - on machine learning and LLMs in our space.

It is trained on datasets of varying quality and with unknown copyright statuses - there has even been speculation that one of ChatGPT’s books sources is… Library Genesis.

Opacity. If we introduce other organizations’ models into our services, we become reliant on them. If we augment our data with these models we cannot necessarily explain how a result was achieved & others cannot replicate the work. This could be in breach of our POSI commitments.

When AI begins to be trained on datasets that it has, itself, labeled, we can expect that existing inaccuracies and problems with output will be intensified.

Data sets that replicate bias could have ethical and legal implications.

Prompt injection attacks pose a security nightmare. They are very hard to avoid.

Data cannot easily be removed from these models, There is thus a problem when a subject retracts consent for their data to be used as it leaves an “algorithmic shadow”. See Li, Tiffany C., ‘Algorithmic Destruction’ (Rochester, NY, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4066845>

Agential AI (where ML processes are connected directly to systems that can cause real-world outcomes) are dangerous. LLMs work by autoregressive predictive generation of the most-likely next token.

There are copyright implications for models that we do not own. We do not yet know how courts will view the use of models that are trained on in-copyright data. In the US this may be transformative use. In other contexts, it may be a violation

The ecological ethics of these systems are at-best dubious. Both training and inference require substantial computational resources, with ecological consequences.

This is how “hallucination” occurs – when the model picks a likely, but contextually incorrect, linguistic formulation.

If this is wired directly to any system with real-world consequences, it could be dire. (“Turn the lawnmower blades on.”)

Using an LLM subjects us to any arbitrary restrictions imposed by the model’s owner.

Tech support may be one of the areas targeted for disruption by AI chatbots. We do not know how well this would work in our specific, context. Debugging problems in the content system based on analysing niche XML input is too narrow a task for LLMs trained on generic writing.

On the other hand, AI-generated code often contains subtle logic bugs and takes programmers longer to debug.

Various types of programming practices at Crossref will likely be influenced by new AI tools (e.g. CoPilot). AI has shown itself to be very good at writing unit test cases – because all that is required is to reflect back the implementation.

There are, therefore, a set of cultural status assumptions embedded in the desire to “ban AI” from writing in science contexts.

suddenly, they can produce text of the same standard as a native speaker. By contrast, the privilege traditionally granted to those who can write well is corroded.

Different groups may benefit (or suffer) differently from the application of large language models. Those from less privileged educational backgrounds or areas of the world where English is not the first language find that,...

There is a difference between using AI to write up the results of scientific research… and using AI to fabricate the content of that write-up.

I will say: they are very good at my dialysis unit. All staff masked. Infection control is excellent. But this should be the norm throughout hospitals.

Just read Newell, A, ‘Metaphors for Mind, Theories of Mind: Should the Humanities Mind?’, in The Boundaries of Humanity, ed. by James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna (Berkeley University of California Press, 1991), pp. 158–97.

Fascinating in light of contemporary AI...

Good of the Guardian to lay its cards on the table: "There is shock... that the financial problems... threaten such prestigious institutions."

"Any idea that the risks are limited to the post-1992 universities should be junked."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/26/the-guardian-view-on-universities-arts-cuts-are-the-tip-of-an-iceberg?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Of course, I didn't give a damn until the more prestigious institutions were threatened.

Scapegoating low-earning but crucial public sector workers, when inflation is actually being driven, in the Bank of England's own assessment, by better off private sector employees.

This morning, I took a historical dive into how people imagined libraries of the future... twenty years ago. Love these past futures...

Great next twist in 2023: Lance Armstrong is now apparently a spokesperson for integrity and fairness in sporting competition.

💉🩸🚴

Sitting with my friend.

Sadly, he's still quite afraid of me. I'm giving him lots of treats and he'll take them from me now at least. But he won't let me stroke him. So I'm not trying to, because I don't want to make him scared. Although I love & desperately want to cuddle him.

It's really difficult to wash and shave when you have tubes coming out of your chest that you mustn't get wet and a surgical wound on your arm, likewise, at the same time. Nonetheless, decided I needed to take control of the furriness situation as my bald patches were showing.

Can't see the bald patches if you're totally bald.

The only thing I don't quite like about my job at Crossref is how the title "Principal R&D Developer" duplicates "development/developer".

When that's your main complaint, you're probably on to a good thing 😂

It's been such a good place to work the past 6 months!

I've got to the exciting point where we can start publicising the things I've been working on, too. 😁

This morning's reading is Kellner, Douglas, Technology and Democracy: Toward a Critical Theory of Digital Technologies, Technopolitics, and Technocapitalism, Medienkulturen Im Digitalen Zeitalter (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2021)

There's quite a bit of dodgy referencing herein. Citations of Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida that are not in the bibliography. References to other works without page numbers - and it's very hard to find the paraphrased sentiment (eg Leo Marx on nature and tech metaphor).

A tad worrying, given all the AI hype, that the future from which The Terminator comes is only 6 years from now.

Mind you, given that the nuclear holocaust was in 1997...

Bit of a regression today on the recovery trend. Feeling poorly as rheumatoid arthritis surges. So I'm watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) to cheer myself up.

This remains such a good action/SF film

We pushed the frontiers of knowledge.

We now know how not to build a shit submarine.

Typically British = doing something incredibly dangerous, against the advice of experts, with untested Heath Robinson tin-can equipment, with terrible consequences for ourselves

The HE pay dispute will only be settled by a new government funding arrangement for universities and the reintroduction of the numbers cap. Neither are likely as they're not political priorities. A resolution without these will trigger job losses at less wealthy institutions.

Only 18% of leave voters think Brexit has been a success. But 61% apparently still think it will be... 🤦

One of those clear demonstrations of confirmation bias.

Ah ha ha ha! We found the philosopher who said Hegel is just a pun on the word "is".

It's Bertrand Russell... But... Thomas Pynchon's fictional Bertrand Russell in Against the Day.

TRP's reality warping strikes again.

With apologies to Blur: I get up when I want, except on Saturdays when I get rudely awoken by a dirty pigeon that has got itself trapped in the kitchen.

PARKLIFE

I continue to improve! Dialysis has brought my blood pressure right down. It's been Grade 3 for the past 10 months before I started. Further, the rheumatoid drugs are, I think, working.

A friend and I are trying to track down an ill-remembered quote. Someone (Derrida? Zizek? Lacan?) said something like "all of Hegel's [or, I think, Heidegger's] work is basically a pun on the word 'being'".

Can anybody help us to find this?

This morning's reading is Rodgers Albro, Sylvia, Fabriano: City of Medieval and Renaissance Papermaking (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2016). More paper histories!

This is the book that I was cursing the other day. It's out of print & very hard to find. Fortunately, Internet Archive had a lending copy (for now, given court rulings). It's tragic that such a serious work of scholarship is so difficult to read, just 7 years after publication.

I shouldn't draw attention to All*son P*arson because I think she's bloody odious. But if you only care about the health and wellbeing of "healthy children", this is, in my opinion, eugenics.

Evening: underway!

My first pint of ale in almost a year. Feeling so much better this week.

(Not allowed much due to kidney failure, but one can't hurt, right?)

This is ridiculous macabre writing on the BBC. Everyone knows the answer: the crew will pass out and die. They might as well run articles called "What happens when you stick your head underwater for 15 minutes without oxygen?"

I love how we try to assemble a history of things in the past that were too lowly to merit attention (e.g. ragpicking for papermaking).

I wonder which aspects of our contemporary life will interest future historians. Daily commuter cycles? The work of computer programmers?

In 1636, papermills were shut down to prevent the spread of plague.

Why papermills?

Because the collection and circulation of rags, which were dirty, was thought to cause contagion!

It's like "Lockdown 1636"!

(Craig, p. 6)

Had a serious offer from a reputable intermediary (with escrow) of $10k for one of my personal domain names. It's tempting, but the risk of identity fraud probably isn't worth it.

This morning's research reading has been Da Rold, Orietta, Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 112 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Getting the acknowledgments list right in a book is hard. The more comprehensive you make it, the greater the risk of offence if you forget someone.

OK, I hope they can rescue the people in the Titanic sub, although I'm sceptical. But it's an interestingly different media response to 5 very wealthy people in danger, against the "send the gunboats to stop the small boats" rhetoric aimed against refugees.

Probably a trite observation, but has just been going around my head all day

I am still not happy with the title of my next book.

"Paper Thin: New Histories of Digital Text" is what I have at present.

The play on "paper thin" is good, as it's about metaphorical collapse. But it sounds as though the book might be itself be a weak argument!

Playing with:

Paper Thin: Material Metaphor in Digital Textual History

The evolution of Laur**** F*x into abhorrent pillock has totally ruined the Morse sequel, Lewis. Although, amusingly, there's an episode where he has a trans love interest.

Liz Truss really is very stupid. Of course, it was the media not understanding the brilliance of her plan to totally crash the UK economy.

Spent this morning trying to get access to a set of texts recommended by a peer reviewer. It's time for my perennial rant: spending hours struggling to get access is *not* research. We should not have this problem, which affects people at less wealthy universities far more.

Non-open-access research systems, therefore, are also highly biased against disabled people for whom the solutions offered -- "go to the library" (can't) or "email the author" (what, and wait weeks?) -- are highly suboptimal.

I can't go to the British Library to get my hands on such rare texts. I am suffering acute kidney failure, have only just started dialysis, and am not supposed to go more than an hour away from the hospital yet. As per that image: I can't afford to buy it, either.

The well-known problem with the Turing Test/imitation game and LLMs is that it turns out that a predictive language model need not have thought behind it to generate plausible imitations.

The British honours system appears to be a total joke. Arbitrary, capricious, and nepotistic. A shame for the many deserving people who get them that they are so devalued. And a shame for the many more deserving people who don't.

It does feel true that different social media platforms have different vibes, although that could be an effect of who I follow.

Twitter feels depressing. Bluesky is jokey/fun. Mastodon is conversational. Facebook is goose memes.

I've been so ill this year that I've lost my habit of writing every morning. 😔

My job at Crossref is so great. But I've had to devote all my free hours to that, because I have to work flexibly around medical appts.

Now my treatment has begun, I hope to start scribbling again.

Watching the streaming version of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Thoughts: staged as a kindof dramatised audio book, they managed to keep some of the great language. The unveiling wasn't done as a huge shock, but I already knew the plot. Hunter was superb. The animals, played by people, were excellent. Bad use of electronic music for shock.

Oops. Got called out on UK/US English differences in my book MS for "rollneck jumpers". Should've gone for "turtleneck sweaters". 🤣

I really hate this discourse of how LLM AIs "lie". It's a mathematical model for predicting the most appropriate next word. Because it's a model, its predictions can result in a sentence that isn't "true", if you read it as meaningful language, rather than a model of language.

There's some advert that uses Primal Scream's "Loaded". It keeps playing on the dialysis ward and I've now got it hideously stuck in my head.

Still enjoying scaring people with the bruising on my fistula surgery arm 😂

Will get a first look at the "under the bandage" area today.

The reason I bruise so badly is 2 decades of steroids.

"While I sympathize with efforts to show the consequences of the humanities’ decline, it may be more important to show the absence of uniformity in how this crisis is experienced by differently situated scholars and students."

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/where-the-humanities-are-not-in-crisis/

"We haven’t had Project Muse for years and recently lost access to JSTOR. Articles behind pay walls require effort to read, and this immediate reality frames how “literature,” “critique,” “crisis,” and “affiliation” intersect with and inform my scholarship."

The UK's health service is on its knees as junior doctors strike today. Thousands of cancelled appointments thanks to an intransigent government that has failed to negotiate. Not that you'd know any of this given total absence of news coverage.

I've been a Rammstein fan since I was a teenager. Mutter was the soundtrack to my GCSE revision. The serious allegations, from multiple women, against their singer cannot be dismissed lightly. I gather there will be an investigation. I feel so disappointed at the band for this.

Elon: all employees must come into the office. Home working is not acceptable!

*Doesn't pay office bills. Company evicted.*

Early decisions made for REF 2028.

Focus on assessing institutions rather than individuals.

That said, I'm disillusioned by the REF and QR allocation. Our department came 2nd nationally but was rewarded by being dismantled due to fee situation.

https://www.ukri.org/news/early-decisions-made-for-ref-2028/

"the funding bodies note that the scope of an open access policy for REF 2028 is much broader than the UKRI Open Access Policy and will consult with the sector before developing the full REF 2028 open access policy"

Scheduled for Autumn 2023

Me: so, err, this guy you named the haemodialysis unit after... What's he famous for?

Them: bleeding to death in the Cathedral.

Me: cool, cool.

I can neither donate for nor receive a kidney transplant.

But had I my life again, with healthy organs that worked, and knowing about kidney failure, I would sign up to be a living donor.

Our lives are all so little and brief. But if you can, your legacy could be saving a life.

I truly believe that many people, reaching the end of their lives, look back and think "what did I do? What is the outcome of my life?"

Few of us make the history books. A better goal - and one I could certainly die happily with - would be: I saved someone else's life.

Here's the other thing: donating your organs after you die is great. Please do this.

But if you donate as a living donor, you will see and know the concrete life you have saved.

Watching @MichaelRosenYes deal with a torrent of Covid deniers so patiently and thinking "perhaps this 'sainthood' thing has some merit".

I never really got into Cormac McCarthy. I read The Road and Blood Meridian during my undergraduate degree. Perhaps I should revisit.

Blimey. Someone local reported a loose staffie. They said they couldn't keep her. The poor thing was in a terrible state with a skin infection. But the worst thing is that she'd attacked a cat and killed it. We managed to get her to an emergency vet who are looking after her.

Somewhat worryingly, the drugs from the hospital have not arrived, although the hospital say they're with the courier. Great.

Dude's getting high on tocilizumab

Today, with any luck, is going to be a good day. Yes, my arm still looks like a post-surgery Battle of the Somme, but the hospital are supposed to be delivering my rheumatoid arthritis drugs - and I can restart them. Thank heavens.

Research* amusing today:

For the uninitiated, “the blob” is the term used by conservative populists to describe people who advise them not to do stupid things that will do long-term damage to public institutions, like leaving the European Union or setting fire to the bond market

A bit nervous. We've taken off more fluid than ever before on my dialysis tonight and I'm worried it's going to make me feel terrible. Fingers crossed.

OK, "Cameo" is very cool. I know that soon you'll be able to deepfake it, but having Commander Tuvok and The Doctor from STAR TREK: VOYAGER wishing Mrs Eve a happy birthday was hilarious!

We watched Polite Society last night, streaming on Amazon Prime. Really hilarious, with excellent martial arts scenes. The claim to fame is that Mrs Eve taught the lead actor drama at school!

The more I use Terraform, the more I am frustrated by the state of Cloud infrastructures. The constant battle for competition between providers means that although we have a great abstracted IoC language, you spend most of your time debugging specifics for, say, AWS. No interop.

Dialysis is quite amazing. This is my accumulating creatinine (a blood toxin waste) levels over the past year or so. Sudden plunge back downwards after first dialysis session 3 weeks ago!

So, for about 9 months, my blood pressure has been appalling. Driven by a combination of kidney failure and uncontrolled rheumatoid arthritis/pain.

Yesterday, after my first three weeks of dialysis, it has shot down into the "optimal" range. Wow.

Nothing has devalued the currency of the honours system more in my mind than Jacob Rees-Mogg being knighted. "Sir". What a joke.

Journals should allow submission in any consistent format. Formatting should actually be the task of the typesetting process.

The millions of dollars in time wasted making papers fit journal guidelines
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01846-9

As I argued eight years ago https://eve.gd/2015/07/16/the-politics-of-style-on-styleguides-in-scholarly-communications/

In fact, making this part of the publishing process would incentivise the creation of structured citation metadata records.

Just organising the logistics between hospitals when you are on dialysis is a nightmare. Clinicians booked my appointment on non-dialysis day. But secretaries then rescheduled so it clashes. You *cannot* miss dialysis for anything. But NHS appts are not flexible.

After vascular surgery for an arteriovenous fistula, you get a little squeeze ball to build up the blood supply. Going gently with it on day 3 after surgery, mind...

On the government claiming there are "unambiguously irrelevant" WhatsApp messages... Surely it *is* relevant that Ministers were distracted by other irrelevant matters when they were meant to be protecting the public?

Surgery is unpleasant and painful when the anaesthetic wears off, but that's nowhere near the worst part. What's worse is that I have to come off my rheumatoid arthritis immunosuppression while it heals - and I feel abysmal, again. It had only just started working!

God it looks rough this morning!

Fistula surgery successful and the new "mega vein" is working. Exhausted now. However, they did accidentally cause some nerve damage. Can't feel my thumb or index finger. Will apparently take 6 months to regenerate.

Aargh. Due to unforeseen surgical delays, my operation has been cancelled after a 6hr wait. I have to come back tomorrow. 😭

I still have to do 4hrs of dialsysis.

It's funny where people you distantly remember end up. A guy I went to school with around age 13 is now a school headmaster. My overriding memory of him is that he was almost expelled for doing a flamethrower from a spray deodorant can in the changing rooms 😂

My favourite medical documentation list type is "symptoms include sneezing, wheezing, shortness of breath, back pain, chest pain, or sudden death."

The "that escalated quickly" list.

Managed to containerize this app today as I move it from a lambda function to Fargate. Some parts of Docker are frustrating as heck...

Tomorrow, I will undergo surgery to create an "AV fistula". This is where they surgically join together a vein and an artery to create a kind of "mega vein" for dialysis access. It takes 8 weeks to mature after the surgery, but then can get the line out of my chest.

With the AI stuff, there's surely also regulatory *redirection* at play? I mean, what needs regulation: use of copyrighted material for training; employment practices and law to protect jobs. What AI corps say needs regulation: killer robot breakout ending humanity. Dead catting.

The Cabinet Office must know they can't win this stupid appeal, right? Like telling the police who have a warrant to search your house that you'll fish out what they need and you'll be the judge of what's relevant.

"Morning stiffness that is a symptom of another type of arthritis, called osteoarthritis, usually wears off within 30 minutes of getting up, but morning stiffness in rheumatoid arthritis often lasts longer than this."

Yeah. Like 10 hours yesterday!

Luka helping me write a revisions letter for the latest book. Admittedly, the "help" mostly consists of suspicious side-eye.

And snoring like a grampus

The swiftness of media coverage of the deaths of the most famous people in the world is a depressing testament to the historical nonmemory to which most of us will be consigned. If the highest of humanity's achievers get one day of coverage and memory, what for the rest?

I am now very confused about the eco creds of electric vehicles. I thought an article just last week showed that, over the vehicle's whole life, electric was far less damaging? I'm also suspicious that this (EVs are no better) is the narrative the climate change deniers want... https://t.co/tYwJdiPDeR

Another thing I learned recently: as your kidneys fail, you have to drink less. At total failure, there's a fluid restriction of about a pint per day! 😭😲

I'm starting to cut back my tea/caffeine intake so I don't get crashing headaches when this is required. Doh!

The more I work with AWS Lambda functions, the more their limitations bug me. Payload limits making me consider rewriting core functionality when we're only talking very low throughput.

Some bloke on the dialysis unit is watching an action movie at full volume, and it's like being dialysed in a war zone!

A confession: even on my 10th book, I am terrified of the reader reports stage. You lose all sight of how a book appears to others when you've been writing it for years. But, today, it was good news for me! Revision suggestions are fair. And the praise has made my weekend 🥰

With my kidney failure, I have to take erythropoietin (EPO) - the drug that Lance Armstrong cheated with.

Bit disappointed that I haven't yet won the Tour de France, mind.

Today, I went for my first walk that wasn't through a hospital clinic in 2+ months. It's a slow, tiring process every time when you've lost all muscle mass. But my rheumatoid arthritis and kidney situation were the best in ages. So carpe diem. (Seize the carp.)

Yeah, dude, wait until you see my kidney function levels for my age and gender...

Dosed up on mega painkillers to make the most of the sunshine and continue rebuilding some strength. Arthritis is pretty bad today, pain levels high, and a lot of correlated nausea. But I made it anyway!

Amusingly, my Garmin app awarded me the "2023 World Bicycle Day" badge, because I went for a very slow... Walk. 🤔

This was also my first walk in months where I didn't use my walking stick. Feel very shaky now and will probably revert to using the stick for the next few days so I don't fall over. But good progress.

Did the same distance again this morning and shaved 4 mins off the time. Totally shattered now, but that's the price you pay for being an elite athlete.

The music friends who organised the festival that I couldn't attend due to kidney failure and covid sent me a parcel full of presents and a card signed by all attendees who know me. A lovely act of kindness. And new tici taci t shirt!