Andrew @generalising@mastodon.flooey.org

Work: I've been in libraries since 2006; among other things, I spent a year as the #WikipedianinResidence at the British Library, wandering around and telling people how nice the internet was, and another five years in #polarlibraries. I now mostly do #scholcomm and #bibliometrics.

#introduction post!

I'm a Scottish librarian working in London; primarily what I write about here is my #wikipedia and #wikidata work.

The biggest chunk of that is the #wikidataMPs #ParliamentaryHistory project - trying to build a rich dataset of historic parliamentarians, and figure out what interesting things it can tell us.

Discovered today that while Kodak still sells film, that business is not owned by what's left of Eastman Kodak: it was taken over by their pension fund, which got it in a bankruptcy to settle the deficit, and it's now owned by the UK defunct pensions scheme & film is made under license.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Alaris

Love the idea of a company ending up just owned by their own pension fund.

ongoing despatches from the soft chewy edge of tax law https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/23/hmrc-loses-marshmallow-case-after-judges-ruling-tax

Scandalous developments in Rotherham, 1937

London Oxford Airport was truly a trailblazer https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/19/oakland-airport-name-change-san-francisco

[checks calendar] 39

https://mastodon.flooey.org/@generalising/112243275438177956

Interesting how this article gently avoids mentioning the denominator (it works out at about 1/1000 under investigation, and 1/3000/year dismissed). https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/15/home-office-staff-under-criminal-investigation-freedom-of-information

This turns out to be about the same order of magnitude as "adults first convicted of an indictable offence each year", ergo people working for the Home Office are approximately just as likely to do crimes as any random section of the population without prior criminal records. Guess there wasn't space to include that.

my work on LLMs has made it to Nature! (Not a sentence I ever expected to write.) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01051-2

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt

The system interface the film used is natural language queries against a large database trained on reading published information, which all sounds familiar, but I'm not sure what they'd have thought on being told that it would take us 65 years to get there and even then the machine sometimes makes things up.

This evening's film: Desk Set (1957), a late Hepburn/Tracy comedy set against the looming spectre of computers coming & taking our jobs.

(Taking *her* job, anyway. He is the computer guy. You can guess how it goes.)

There were I think 52 in 2017-19 - the Brexit purges by the Conservatives - but the five Parliaments before that each only had 5-10 people suspended or resign the whip.

Have we got higher standards or shadier MPs? (Or possibly both)

back on the #wikidataMPs coalface today and backfilling the various people who've changed parties over the past term.

There are a lot more than I thought - I make it 38 distinct MPs who either resigned the whip or had it taken away? (One of those was for only a couple of hours - the party suspended him before he could announce his resignation)

More on LLMs and peer reviews: https://www.404media.co/chatgpt-looms-over-the-peer-review-crisis/

(Back to work tomorrow, & to revising the paper. I feel it's going to be a race to keep up.)

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt