Category Archives: algorithms

Social Audio

Social Audio is a new term to me in this guise. I enjoyed Brian Cantrill’s talk, Social Audio as a Vector For Engineering Wisdom, about Oxide’s use: https://youtu.be/W8qiDhlFVCE. I do like the idea for multiple voices in a meeting and sharing information. I do wonder if this is amenable to digital methods and combining the […]

Shared Standards

I am parking this here as an example of shared standards between Google and Apple (TechCrunch). Android have announced a feature to identify tracking devices with a view to creating a shared specification at some point. The idea of shared specifications has appeared before but it is something that is worth tracking for now as […]

Finding voices

The API apocalypse (if we’re feeling melodramatic) is causing some issues for Digital Methods. I enjoyed David Peirce’s article on the Verge today, asking where everyone will meet now. This is going to be challenging question going fowards. Recently, I have been looking at Mastodon and the Fediverse as perhaps the final set of APIs […]

Parallel social lives?

A recent experiment, which will be discussed in due course, has taken me back to thinking about parallel computing in Python using the multiprocessing library. This also reminds me of a conversation that I had with David De Roure as we walked to a seminar after some experiments using Raspberry Pi (2 and 3) boards […]

Which media to be social?

We live in interesting times in terms of social media. I am preparing to teach social media APIs this coming term. Last year, we were caught by the Ukraine invasion and this year, we are wondering how Twitter is going to react, or even if it will last. The Nature article on Twitter and science […]

Carefully approaching a Mastodon

Like many people, I have been having a look at Mastodon for use and research. As I am currently updating my labs for next term, I thought that I’d have a slightly deeper look using R (the labs’ language) and the rtoot package. It is only a sketch but the existing work seems promising for […]

ML and a looming replicability crisis

Elizabeth Gibney’s Nature article, Could machine learning fuel a reproducibility crisis in science?, is an intriguing exploration about reproducibility in disciplines that use Machine Learning with a particular focus on computational reproducibility. The challenges of training data from the same period or even including data in both training and evaluation data, or data leakage, are […]

Memory as Signal

Benjamin N Jacobsen’s article in New Media and Society, When is the right time to remember?: Social media memories, temporality and the kairologic, explores the concerns of memory in socio-technical systems like Twitter and Facebook. The one thing that strikes me is the idea that the window that is used. Maybe it is a result […]

Strava, segments, and tracking

A few years ago, Strava visualised the GPS co-ordinates in their data and displayed the locations of secret bases. A change of privacy settings later and, apparently, all was secret again. The Guardian has just run a story on using segments and GPS locations to show individuals within the bases through re-purposing the segment function. […]

Notes on recent blogs

A post on Slashdot pointed me towards the post, High-Performance Mobile System-on-Chip Clusters, on the ACM blog. Posting here as a sticky note for a potential project. However I am also aware that this might become part of the notes graveyard, Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/259098-high-performance-mobile-system-on-chip-clusters/fulltext https://reproof.app/blog/notes-apps-help-us-forget.