We are here for day 2, and we brought flowcharts!

Today’s office: Iris Ethics is proud to be the Networking Event sponsor for the @eisummit.org #EIS2025 Summit. Set up a mini-booth to talk about all things ethical review and how we can support high quality implementation research.

You have been summoned before The Council. What are you accused of, and how will you defend yourself?

It has to be said: Annabel Crabb’s tie game is amazing. #AusVotes

Random brainwave: It just clicked that the song “Happy” by @pharellwilliams.bsky.social is written entirely in a minor key. That’s extremely clever.

Some light reading for the long weekend…

The 2025 Barkley Marathons is over. There are no finishers. #BM100

And we’re back… for about 60 seconds, and then back off. I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if a thousand air conditioning units suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Power’s out my side of Warrnambool.

Movies you’ve watched more than 6 times, using only GIFs.

So I’m not saying today’s Fairfax Quick was easy (it wasn’t), but there’s a reason there’s a rule at the office that says I can’t participate in doing the crosswords until after 3pm when everyone else has had a go. New PB. Now to try and solve a @dontattempt.bsky.social quick that fast.

The world is pretty awful at the moment. Trying to block it out by doing cool stuff. Today it was setting a PB in a 10k race and then going to the park on the way home to show my parents in law koalas in the wild. Pretty cool.

Meanwhile on LinkedIn, apparently calling out people for transphobia makes me an #ActuallyAutistic misogynist:

Meanwhile in AI land, I just got a local deployment of Deepseek R1 (1.5B) running on a sandbox machine. Which isn't all that impressive in itself, except that my sandbox is a 2013 Macbook Air booting Linux off a USB flash drive.

Honestly, the more I think about it the more I believe social media is the cigarettes of our era: addictive, harmful to our health, and making everything stink.

Nothing about us without us. From my extensive reading, Participatory Research seems to be the only ethical way to research. Otherwise, research is exploitative and extractive. It is all about participants' emancipation. Their lived experience overrides all, especially in psychology.

Hi, friendly reminder: You can open stories and read them instead of merely responding to a headline? Reading stories is proven to be a way more useful endeavor, and, fun fact, it helps journalists keep their jobs. If you like that sort of thing.

Gotta love #F1 fans - there are a few of these scattered around the world. The ones in Baku are especially hilarious.

Ozzy Osbourne really captures where things are at right now: youtu.be/tMDFv5m18Pw?...

Honor is important. Look no further than the hateful antics of those who have none to see why.

Why should you fight injustice, if it affects only others? Why should you defend rights that don't affect you? Because it isn't justice if you only care when it applies to you. Because rights apply to all, or nobody at all. Because you are a true warrior, and honor demands it.

Three things that remain true, no matter what Trump does: 1) Trans people have as much right to express their identities with dignity as anyone else. 2) Immigrants are awesome, create wealth, and make our culture better. 3) Trade with people around the world enriches us, and not just financially.

While the title might say it's for schools, it's a useful primer for people looking at rolling out AI in their workflow, covering both the tech and the ethics, from someone who has been in the weeds with this for a long time.

Welcome TikTok teens, *turns chair around* have you ever felt the rush of writing a pithy little sentence and having strangers get mad about their own bad-faith interpretations of it? 😎

Yup, @jamellebouie.net has this exactly right. What these guys are celebrating/pursuing/yearning for is not masculine energy, it's *adolescent* energy. Drinking Red Bull, crushing Call of Duty, refusing to clean your room. It is indescribably pathetic. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/o...

Did get a good haul of books today. But held off on buying the mugs. Probably would be good for a drinking game where every time a bell is mentioned or rung you have to drink and do an Esmerelda dance.

As a blind dude, your images mean nothing to me without an alt-text description. I know it’s a pain & I have zero expectations of you using this #Accessibility tool so thoughtfully provided by #BlueSky but I appreciate every effort. It doesn’t have to be The Great Gatsby but please include me 😎

Onto more preparation for the coming work year. Next book to revisit is Kouzes and Posner’s “The Leadership Challenge”. (In between making chocolate fudge and cleaning the house.)

An offhand observation while revisiting leadership texts: the list in the picture is of behaviours that inhibit a productive group culture. And yet the governance of nations is given over to people who regularly engage in these things, especially 16. Seems prima facie illogical to me.

Also as part of planning, took a sneak peek at my email inbox. Just a casual 300 or so there. Starting to wonder if I was the only one who took a holiday.

Spending the next two days on preparing for the coming year. PD and planning, starting with a review of some core texts on leadership in consulting. This morning it’s McKenna and Maister’s “First Among Equals”.

The Infinite Women database officially has more than 6,000 biographies, woot! Warhead remains unimpressed.

Still on holidays, if you're wondering. Normal service will resume next week, whatever "normal" looks like. Despite my best efforts, my "to be read" pile expanded instead of shrunk, along with my 3D printing backlog. But the garden is slightly less weed-covered, so that's a plus.

Credit: @hotpaper.bsky.social

Wherever this café is, let's all go there right now. 🥰

Finished one more book, so onto the next. Jerome K Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat. Haven’t got past the first page and am laughing at the continued relevance of the narrator’s observation. Could just as easily apply to WebMD or pharmaceutical ads today. “Plus ça change…” as the French say:

As a disabled and queer person, I often hear academics professing that they will become advocates "after tenure". All the very obvious critiques of this aside, one day I will be quick enough to ask. And what if you don't get tenure? What good will you have done then?

Found a transphobic sticker stuck on a pole at the supermarket this morning. Got out my multitool and removed it, manager came and asked me what I was doing. When I told him, his response was: "Carry on then". Transphobia and homophobia aren't welcome in Warrnambool.

This is a great exercise that I use when teaching presentation skills. Very fun and thought provoking.

Of course, started in on a second book (“F1 Racing Confidential” by @gilesrichards.bsky.social) to find it’s got great insights on creating organisational culture and team management. Which makes it a work related book in my opinion, not least because a few of my team are also keen F1 fans.

Finally getting into a holiday rhythm after three weeks, managed to finish reading a book (not work related). Though it was an anthology of Borges, who could put the cognitive equivalent of ten novels into a single paragraph.

Dorothy Parker to Robert Benchley, December 31, 1929. Happy New Year!

This cover is 🔥🔥🔥

So I have come to the conclusion that Bluesky is no less toxic than Twitter, Facebook or any other social media platform. People are cruel and hurtful regardless of their political views, and I see that in a lot of posts here. A lot of jumping down people’s throats and defaulting to hate.

Abby sleeping facedown is such a mood. She's really captured the zeitgeist going into 2025.

Looking at memes with @infinite-women.com: IW: You can 3D print that, right? Me: In theory… There goes the rest of my vacation time.

You need no special holiday or celebration to treat others with respect and compassion. If it is something you only practice at certain times, then you have misunderstood the reason for doing it. Every day is worthy of living honorably.

Talking with @infinite-women.com about how I may be doing a 3d printing repair job on the face of a statue that’s been damaged. Her response: “You’re literally a plastic surgeon!”