Apple knows you know

I have a work provided iPhone as well as my own personal phone.

I actually don’t really use my work phone - I have a work phone principally because I used to travel a lot overseas and in Australia and by giving me a phone it meant I could do the ET phone home thing when there was a problem without having to try and reclaim the cost of calls.

And smartphones allow you to do more - I’ve never quite been at the stage of a colleague who ssh’d into a recalcitrant box from his iPhone while transiting in Seoul - but you get the picture.

Now the iPhone ‘knows’ some things if you scroll down on the lock screen it will tell you the temperature and what events you have scheduled - and in the afternoons how long it would take you to drive home - strangely enough always 29 minutes.

Now I usually go to the supermarket to do the weekly shop on Wednesdays because we like to to the Farmer’s market and deli shopping together on Saturday mornings. So every Wednesday I’m off to Mawson to buy the staples plus some fresh salad, bread, OJ etc.

Yesterday for some reason I checked the outside temperature before leaving work on my iPhone rather than my personal phone. And I noticed that it said it would take you 23 minutes to drive to Mawson right now - ie my phone ‘knew’ it was Wednesday and that I go to a supermarket in Mawson that day.

Computationally quite interesting and slightly scary …

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And can we make a decent open access reading list ?

I recently suggested that it might be able to put together an open access reading list for the classics.

So I did, purely as an experiment. I picked a very random (and very short) list of university classics departments and downloaded their introductory reading lists. Some were fairly short some were more oriented to summer reading (and the suspicion that most students would do little if any). I collated the Exeter, Tufts, Warwick and KCL lists and came up with the following:

Author	Book	Source	Online
Homer	Iliad	KCL, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Homer	Odyssey	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Sophocles	Oedipus	KCL, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Sophocles	Antigone	Tufts	Gutenberg
Virgil	Aeneid	KCL, Exeter, Warwick	Adelaide e-books
Tacitus	Annals	KCL, Exeter	Adelaide e-books
Juvenal	Satires	KCL, Warwick	Internet Archive
Plato	Symposium	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Plato	Republic	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Herodotus	Histories	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Suetonius	Lives of the Caesars	Exeter	Gutenberg
Seneca	Letters from a Stoic	Exeter	Internet archive
Ovid	Metamorphoses	Exeter	Adelaide e-books
Lucian	True History	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Theocritus	Idylls	Tufts	Gutenberg
Aristotle	Poetics	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Aristotle	Nichormachean Ethics	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Longus	Daphne and Chloe	Tufts	Internet Archive
Thucydides	Histories	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Xenophon	Anabasis	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Horace	Satires	Warwick	Adelaide e-books
Aristophanes	Clouds	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Aeschylus	Oresteia	Tufts	Adelaide e-books

In the main I found the texts on the University of Adelaide's ebook sitse. Adelaide E-books (ebooks.adelaide.edu.au) is a paricularly good source of texts and in some cases has alternative translations, as well as links to wikipedia etc. It's not just classical texts, there's a good range of English literature texts as well.

All sites allow downloads in both epub and mobi format meaning that the books can be read on a kindle or on a tablet, including one of the cheap no-name Android tablets that can be picked up for less than a $100, in some cases considerably less.

I've made no attempt to assess the text for accuracy, but what this little paper exercise shows is that it is perfectly possible to create an open access reading list.

While you may argue that having to own a tablet is a barrier to access, most (potential) students already have a suitable device, and with a decent second hand paperback copy of Suetonius's Twelve Caesars costing around $10 with shipping we can argue that even if you have to buy a tablet the exercise is better than cost neutral ...

Open classics - a modest proposal

In the sciences one of the great current tropes is open access, ie publishing research papers in journals that do not require a subscription to access them, and equally importantly making research data available for re use and reanalysis.

There are other parallel movements such as open textbooks, open online courses etc.

Classics is also an area ripe for open access. Much of the material revolves around texts and the reanalysis of texts, and authoritative translations abound. I suspect that many classicists only know a number to texts from translations.

Acquiring the key texts and translations is not particularly difficult or costly - many have been around for years and reasonable second hand copies can be picked up through the various online second hand booksellers for a few dollars.

But of course, that does present a barrier for access - first of all one needs these few dollars and scronly one needs the time and the inclination to hunt for decent second hand copies and then wait for the postal systems of the world perform their miracle of nineteenth century technology.

Absolutely fine for a dilettante with a disposable income like me, less so for a student undertaking a course, especially one in a country such as Australia where the classics are most definitely fading.

So, to my proposal:

1. Assemble a list of university reading lists
2. Identify the most commonly listed items
3. Identify suitable online (free) sources where possible
4. Make the resource list available online

A very simple idea, and one that can be extended to other areas, for example medieval studies, English literature etc.

The virtue of this idea is that it works to reduce the cost of access, and also encourages ‘reading around’ a topic, ie don’t just read the set texts, read related ones, and get some understanding and insight.

In a time when books were paper and most university towns had a couple of second hand bookshops stocked with cheap second hand paperbacks, happenstance and reading around could be done very cheaply - forty years ago I used to play a game with myself on a Saturday afternoon - take my spare change after I’d attended to the week’s expenses, count it up, split it in half, and see what I could find in the way of interesting reading for half of what I’d got left of the week’s money.

Nowadays such a game wouldn’t be possible - second hand bookshops are mostly online which robs the exercise of the happenstance element - and happenstance is an important part of learning and discovery.

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A distraction free writing machine

A week or so ago I upgraded my old EEEpc to Crunchbang linux - and I’m quietly impressed with its capabilities as a distraction free notetaker and writing machine.

Since the upgrade I’ve used it seriously for two or three meetings and to write a couple private documents, including an old style put in the mail letter. Performance has been more or less flawless.

With only ReText (for markdown) and AbiWord (for anything pretty) and no mail client other than Alpine for getting stuff off the machine this means you can focus on the text, or when using it as a note taker, on what’s being said. No other email, no twitter, no urge to distract yourself with wikipedia.

And it’s good. It’s fast (and fast to boot), and nicely responsive.

There are some downsides - the browser is a pain to use, though, with the export capabilities of both Abiword and Retext there’s no real need to use external services like MarkdowntoPDF or Cloudconvert.

Basically, documents are written on the machine and then either emailed off to Dropbox if they need more work or to Evernote to archive. I originally didn’t bother installing printing, but I’ve since added printer support just for the ease of producing bullet lists or handouts.

One of course needs to be realistic - it’s a five year old low power machine with a small non standard display - you cannot seriously expect to run anything and everything on it - for example I’d have doubts about running an R session on it, or doing any serious text manipulation.

Or indeed anything meaty written in Java.

But I have other machines for that. What I do have now is a small format machine that can fit in a man bag, has a decent keyboard and battery life, and being small and light can be taken along on a trip as a second writing machine …

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Brisbane Altmetrics workshop

Over the past few months I’ve written about altmetrics and impact for example here and here

Yesterday I went to an ANDS sponsored workshop on Altmetrics and Impact in Brisbane - you can find my meeting notes online here - it’s an evernote share of a pdf, and you may be asked to click to view to get to the actual note.

As a calibration exercise it was incredibly useful - it convinced me that we’re roughly in the right place with altmetrics, namely

• no one has a complete view on altmetrics, impact and engagement
• attempts at quantification are partial at best
• academic publishers are interested and investing in altmetrics due to change in their business model
  
  • attempt is by maintaining relevance and providing specialist services
• impact is increasingly seen as an important alternative to classic citation rates
• impact measurement tools are partial at best

So, altmetrics, bibliometrics or what have you will provide some interesting times. One interesting aside was that someone had used text analysis techniques on a set of pharmaceutical papers suggesting that one company may have an in house ghost writing team. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - having documentation or writing specialists finesse text is by no means bad, although there has to be a question as to whether there may be an attempt to game the system by producing more readily citable papers.

Whether or not it is the case, I found it quite a nice use of the power of open access and being able to reuse documents as data for other analyses …

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