Everyday at sea is different and unpredictable. Today we're going to try and protect other ships from floating bananas. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Anyone else in UK academia feel "open access publishing" has made things worse? In 2010 I could download pretty most papers for free. Most journals did not charge to publish. Now many of the most obvious journals cost a few thousand quid article processing. Ability to download papers got no better.

Watching a TV show and a character in law enforcement complained loudly that she had not got a gun. Later in the plot it would have been very useful for her to be able to fire a gun but she was unable to do so as there was no gun. Chekov's absence of gun.

Lovely mathematical jargon: A Procrustes problem transforms points in embeddings until they look like each other. In legend the innkeeper Procrustes transformed his customers (by stretching or shrinking -- typically unpleasant for customer) to match his bed. This is literally embedding.

Last day of lectures for UCL. Must have done something right as the students gave me a biscuit (well Jaffa cake). Good lecturer. Have biscuit.

It was an absolutely baffling decision to ask for strike action - it was doomed to fail and it worsens the negotiating position. It is a genuine shame. Not that long ago the union looked strong. This is a real failure of leadership.

Stable door shutting expert called in after horse bolting incident. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I went to an event at Goodenough college. It was a great event but I could not shake the feeling I had wandered into a parallel parody academia.

Nice afternoon lecturing at UCL. Bloomsbury is very attractive at Christmas.

Konect aka Koblenz collection seems to have disappeared and been replaced by a cybersquatting website. Anyone know what happened there or have a working URL?

Halloween papercraft. Fun model to make. @robives.bsky.social @threadsaplenty.bsky.social

I really love this -- inferring Anglo Saxon history from linguistics, place names, geography and network science: keithbriggs.info/AS_networks....

Fascinated by how ChatGPT does at my exam questions. It managed to extract a correct transition matrix from a text description of a Markov chain "consider someone doing x with probability of doing y". It had a damn good go at drawing the chain -- in ASCII art! The later choice is wild but I love it.

Maybe 2020 was somehow emotionally exhausting looking at the Markov chain exam question I set: "Sisyphus is pushing a boulder up a mountain which is 3000 metres tall. He will move every hour according to the following rules. With probability 1/2 he will go 1000 metres up the mountain..."

Little bit of signal processing humour for a Monday morning.

New addition to my teaching slides: "where LLM will mislead you". ChatGPT and FFT/DFT is interesting. It got a 4 point correct (I only tried one). On an 8 point it got it wrong (but showed working). When I said it was wrong it got it right (when pressed admiited to internal python fft routine).

Editing colleague's powerpoint and thinking about typesetting crimes. Co-worker created a beautiful graphic but spelled temporal with no l. We superimposed a powerpoint leter l as it was last minute. Four years later I'm still using that graphic and adding the l every time. #feelsbadman

I crack me up (nobody else but I find it funny). [Writing a presentation about tracing crypto dealings.]

Always a pleasure to work with @computerphile.bsky.social - this week it's back to basics with the layers model of the Internet: youtu.be/eelvWAURfdI?...

Today's meeting Me: "I have an early draft of the grant on topic X we discussed for previous six weeks. Do not be afraid to criticise." Five other academics: "X is dull we want to do Y instead." Me: "You bunch of buggers." Now writing a draft of an grant on Y (which is > X).

Here are your 10 -essential- AI prompts for academics ... make your life easy with help from @profserious.bsky.social profserious.substack.com/p/10-ai-prom...

Honestly @bridgecommand.bsky.social is crazy good fun. Flying our own spaceship. Accidentally killing our senior officers.

After so many years of networks research a paragraph that begins "Let G = (V,E) be a simple, undirected network where V is the set of nodes" is like slipping under a warm blanket. So soothing.

Writing a grant proposal and a co author told me that rigorous data analysis is not exciting or sexy. My head knows it is true but my heart cannot accept this.

From a teams meeting I am in right now and I am honestly infuriated.

Absolutely fantastic. The treatment is expensive and difficult but any progress against Huntington’s disease is good and this is amazing progress. Hooray!

I just found out that ISO stands for the International Organisation for Standardization (which is Standardisation in UK English). In French Organisation Internationale de Normalisation. Oh my god, they can't even standardise their name. This 1952 journal cover infuriates me.

PhD supervision is one of the most rewarding parts of my job. A completed PhD is one of the most rewarding parts of that process. Nice to have a couple of pints in the pub to celebrate a completed thesis today.

Staying with my dad for a while. This small statue with spiderweb in the rain is beautiful.

📣 Job alert! *Assistant Prof in Computational Social Science*. We're a friendly department, with sharp students, at a great institution, in a lovely city. We have real strengths in computational social science & are looking for a colleague to build this further. Share and reach out with quesions!

This photo makes me immensely happy. With Dr Barnes, Dr Steer and Dr Arnold (three brilliant PhDs) after listening to networks talks. Great evening and all three of them have jobs where they study complex networks all the time.

Japanese menus continue to confound.

Tokyo hotel room view of sign specially for those who are on the spectrum since it features both keming and a sequence of colours that is not the spectrum.

Peak show off dive photo with manta ray (right), Caron (centre) and me (left). They circled for forty minutes being cleaned by tiny fish and then one of them took a gigantic poo that filled most of my field or vision. Nature is majestic.

This man coffees (Ishigaki, Japan). The nearest other one is Fuku coffee which gives a different feeling to me.

A moderately standard sci-fi story is where a visitor is worshipped as a god because of their uncanny but accidental resemblance. Putting in my application for this.

Things are getting out of hand here in Japan.

Issued this to someone feeling bad about their work. If you need one feel free to also have it.

Oh my God Londoners: "Boarding position for fastest transfer" - I have spent a long time mentally modeling this including trying to memorize which stations go in which direction since my nearest tube only has an exit at one end.

2022 the best AI I had access to failed my Internet Protocols exam badly. This year it gets 100% and helps tighten up loose wording in questions and spots where I messed a question up. I can automatically catch careless slips in exam setting. First time I saw it get subnetting right.

www.reddit.com/r/transgende... Guess what? The story about the trans M&S employee and the bra fitting is a pack of lies and distortions. Want to know what really happened and how colleagues stood up for her? Read her own account here.

Me justifying fitting know statistical models rather than throwing all the data into some ML/AI pipeline and seeing what pops up.

Me teaching database consistency: "So these systems can prevent things like selling the same ticket twice." Me on a train "Yes looks like we both have the same ticket reservation on the same train. Computers mess up I guess." (Twice in a couple of months for two hour journeys.)

"The stars shot madly from their spheres" - London has been watching Midsummer Nights Dream for more than 425 years. It remains surprising and joyful when done well.

Our online system for "claiming" publications found 51 new publications for me today. It seems it decided I'm now every R. Clegg publishing in any kind of science and swept up decades of my research on welding, plywood, aircraft and proteins. Not quite "I'm every woman" but "I'm every R. Clegg."

Enjoying the game Alters but it has a severe case of "fictional scientist syndrome". Fifteen hours in and the "scientist" supervised constructing a bridge, analysed a gravitational anomaly and performed a medical procedure on a sheep. "What was your PhD topic mate?" "Just science, all of it."

As a local to the area it is always lovely when HMS Belfast invites a friend for a sleepover.

Working with data always throws up some weirdness. I'm working on an energy/5G networks data set that has had at least 8,000 teams analysing it. The data is energy readings and network parameters every hour for many base stations. There's a lot in it, sleep modes, load, antenna and power parameters.

types of network science papers

I really enjoy the Cosener's conference even if I look a bit stressed at the time. I'm very happy with the community we have built here.