Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: August 2020

  • Thoughts on open access journals

    Yesterday I spent a few minutes writing about an internet outage that occurred on Sunday. Apparently, that outage was caused by some type of internet protocol issue downstream with a base provider of backbone services. What I thought was interesting is that none of the websites impacted really seemed to send any notice to consumers at all. They just posted a few notes on social media and moved along. My email inbox contained nothing about the outage at all. That should probably not surprise me at all, but it does for some reason. I thought maybe some of these companies would provide notice of downtime, but maybe they have learned that regular and swift communication does nothing to help them at the time of incident. Based on that they simply handle the inbound inquiries and move along. I ended up posting via the WordPress application on my Google Pixel 4 XL Android based smartphone. It was pretty easy to pull up the Google Doc and cut and paste the content from yesterday over and post it. At the time, I thought it was interesting that my desktop network was failing and the cellular one was successful. None of that was as interesting as the donut that ended up getting purchased, but that is an entirely different category of adventure. 

    My notes contain an entry about creating forward looking journal articles trying to capture the trajectory of the field. Instead of writing literature reviews that are retrospective this would be an attempt to take the last 90 days or maybe 180 days of journal articles in a specific field and capture and catalog all of the next steps and future research notes. All of those compiled direction based signals about the future of research could help provide a look at the trajectory of research within the field. That type of effort could be pretty interesting to complete. It might be interesting to do a retrospective study on all the promised future research that did not make publication. It is entirely possible that the author finished it and it might not have been accepted for publication or they submitted it to a different journal. Sometimes trying to track down the trail of publications from a specific author is challenging. We don’t really have a seamless system to search all journal articles at one time. They are like little silos of intellectual capital hiding in different ivory towers. A lot of journals are starting up now that have public facing access to all of their content. Those open journals are for me the future of academic publications. Selfishly for those researchers who do not have university/college powered credentials for logins to the various journals it makes it much easier to keep up. 

    As an independent researcher I have access to the premier journals in the field of public administration from my paid dues to the American Society for Public Administration. I even pay to have them send me the journals in the mail to make it easier for me to remember to read them based on the physical reminder sitting on my desk. Outside of my public administration based research interests the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are easier to understand. Most of the researchers in those fields are very eager to share publications and preprints and you can very easily go out and start searching arXiv for electric preprints of articles. It is very easy to start reading and digging through the content. With arXiv you have to carefully watch the references of the papers you are reading to get a sense of where the literature review is being built from and what work the researchers are building upon. Those breadcrumbs provide the intellectual legacy within the academy and you are going to have to do some work to get to the foundational articles. They might not be freely available to read. Sometimes I end up going to the authors websites and reading the content that was instead of trying to get a subscription to read it. 

  • Slowly starting Sunday

    Things did not get off to a very fast start today. My focus is a little bit off at the moment. Things are even stacked up in my Google Keep note taking application to cover. I have been writing down a few ideas during the day in case inspiration does not strike before the sun comes up during these predawn writing sessions. Strangely enough this morning the only thing that really seems to be coming into focus relates to my thoughts about who might sell me the best possible donut this morning. When my attention shifts from writing to donuts things are not going to progress very well. The only thing saving this passage of prose at the moment is that the caffeine from two shots of espresso is starting to kick into action. The first change to leave the house and buy donuts will not happen for at least 30 minutes. That does leave a little bit of time to sit here and work on something. I’m going to try to ensure that it is not a top five favorite donuts list. That would not take thirty minutes to produce: 1) cinnamon twist/roll, 2) blueberry cake, 3) chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, 4) regular frosted, and 5) maple frosted. While that list is not exactly definitive it is relatively accurate. A wild mood here or there might inspire some other specific donut related food hunger that could push me outside of my top five. I have also not to the best of my knowledge ever had my top five donuts back to back at one time. I’d probably have to cut them in half and share them with somebody or finish them later to make that happen. 

    Whoa —- I have been publishing for 105 consecutive days and this is the first one where I got the dreaded, “This site can’t be reached,” error. Apparently the site was taking too long to respond to requests and timed out. It’s hosted so this happens from time to time, but it is still extremely annoying. Strangely enough from my phone I was able to get the mobile version of the website without any delay or timeout. It loaded pretty fast. I switched over and opened the website in an incognito window of Chrome which timed out as well. At this point, my best bet might be to go get a glass of water and bide my time for a few minutes while things stabilize. Generally the uptime from my server hosting company is pretty good.  At the moment, that is not the case. After about 5 minutes, I did the logical thing and went out to Twitter and searched for “internet outage” and filtered to the latest instead of top tweets. Strangely enough for something that just started happening Twitter is generally faster thanks to the crowd sourcing element of how people post things vs. going out to a news aggregator like Google News. All of those Tweets are not curated or managed by a newsroom, but you can get a sense of an event like an internet outage by reading a few tweets that are similar to what you are seeing. In this case I’m just validating my experience through a crowd sourced platform. 

    Alternative methods for validation…

    Another crowd sourcing option would be to visit one of the down detection websites that allows users to notify the world of their dissatisfaction with things that are down. I did load the down detector website (which is working) and whoa if it is now showing a massive number of major things are being impacted at the moment. 

    If you wanted to use Google Trends, then you could search for “internet outage” as a search team to see how many people are impacted and where. This method gives you results that are sorted geographically thanks to the power of Google. This can be more interesting if you are trying to dial into exactly where the problem happens to be occurring. The other methods are going to be more general in nature since they are way more open ended to worldwide feedback. 

    Instead of getting donuts this morning I’m sitting here reading about the internet outage. I’m sitting here wondering what might have caused this type of impact. That type of questioning actually pushed my dreams of donuts to the side for a few minutes. Today I had planned to spend some time watching videos on YouTube about the “Anthos Service Mesh” after my writing sessions. That effort has been postponed. The other thing I have been working on is watching videos and doing labs from Coursera in the, “Architecting with Google Kubernetes Engine Specialization.” I’m going to finish up the 4 classes on that one during the month of September. That is part of my continuous learning efforts to be able to know enough to actively work as a cloud architect. As things continue to consolidate into a handful of public cloud companies the reality of facing major downtime events is probably going to get worse before it gets better. 

  • Increasingly discursive prose

    Right now I think the ability to engage in longer form discourse of a deep and meaningful nature is more needed than ever. Our ability to communicate a philosophy about things has been diminished. Discourse has changed and in the methods of consumption in the public square have changed. All of the social media posts have the depth and effect of walking by a sign on the wall in the public square. Really deep and meaningful communication about complex issues has boiled down to simplistic exchanges of platitudes that have been ignored before they were even uttered. Within that argument I started to wonder if we have a structural communication problem for intellectual thought leaders. Maybe all of the public intellectuals still exist, but they have no method to actually communicate that reaches the public mind. That must be exceedingly frustrating for them assuming they are aware of the phenomenon occurring. This weblog has a target audience of one person. It is literally written for me to be able to think out loud and consolidate my thoughts. These words are not written like a soaring political speech to communicate to the world. Each post is just an increasingly discursive collection of my prose.

  • Thinking about being principled

    I have a note here that today is the day this writing session should focus on writing with principles. At first this morning, I read that as writing with purpose. I was thinking that writing 3 paragraphs about writing with a purpose should be pretty easy. It took a few moments to realize that writing about principles is harder than writing about purpose. You have to sit down and try to grasp at the foundation of things to write about principles that matter. Maybe we would be better off if more time was spent trying to explain principles in the public square, news media, or just during internet based discussions. I could reduce the scope of this writing challenge and just focus on writing about economic principles. That would be one way to focus this effort on a few key principles. You could spend some time researching economic principles and that would be an interesting look down the rabbit hole of published and commonly shared research. 

    One way to start digging into thinking about principles would be to try to figure out a few normative principles. That could start the journey on a road built around ethics. Maybe that is a harder place to start than a road built around economics, but it could be a lot more fun that way. Either way the concepts being covered within those fields seems to be secondary to the way people consume knowledge these days. Yesterday I read a note from somebody that argued within the media you can find coverage from whatever point of you are seeking. That made me think about the process of filing a story in a newsroom. It used to be that articles were filled and editors provided a real true curation and testing of the concepts and ideas being brought forward. Our news cycles were curated in a more thoughtful and less rushed fashion. Now being first within the never ending stream of media is the key defining element of the process instead of any type of curation or testing. The test for releasing things into the world seems to be speed instead of making a contribution to the academy of knowledge we share. That distinction is the key element of why learning principles and understanding the frameworks of complex philosophy gave way to situational decision making. Reactions to things have taken over for decision making and the normative ethics that should exist have given way as the normative game around us brokedown and were replaced by something deeply troubling. 

    We have to accept some fundamental truths and build out some type of normative ethics to begin the journey together toward some type of working civil society. At the moment, I wonder if we have nothing to share but a stream of first in the pool articles being filed as news, social media utterances, and a fractured public square. Naturally I want to turn this set of arguments toward something inherently positive focused on how a return to principled action could benefit everybody, but I’m still trying to figure out what foundation is shared anymore than would be a basis for a shared understanding. It’s entirely possible that the public mind has become two more minds that need some type of deep conceptual bridge to facilitate communication between them to be built. That is the argument that scares me the most when I think about the future.

  • Thinking about publishing platforms

    Yesterday, I sort of missed using the Movable Type blog publishing platform. Initially all my online content was made using Microsoft FrontPage. Oddly enough I was really good at doing things with Microsoft FrontPage. It was really easy to use and administer. Along the way it had seemed like a good idea to switch over to using the Movable Type system. That was probably around 17 or 18 years ago. Somewhere along the way probably around 2009 things were moved over to WordPress. That is pretty much how things went. They went from the platform I really liked to two that I could take or leave. A lot of different options exist for people to build and publish content online these days. Both Movable Type and WordPress helped people along the way get used to publishing content online and they were pretty straightforward to get installed and to manage. The long pole in the tent requirement for me was that the software had to be self hosted. That rules out a lot of the platforms straight away. I want to have the code sitting on my server and manage it myself. That might be an outdated thing to consider in this world of cloud enablement, but my words are my words and I host them myself. 

    Apparently, I could go out and learn how to deploy my weblog software on GCP or Azure. That is probably something that I should learn to do just to keep current on cloud deployments. I could deploy my own instance and manage it on one of those cloud platforms. Maybe that is something to think about working on for this weekend. The real trick would be scripting the entire setup on GCP so it could be executed in one shot. That might be a valid use of my time to demonstrate the ability to do a small deployment. These days figuring out ways to expand my toolkit to have examples of doing things in the cloud is probably not a bad way to spend my time. I spent some time looking at the newer courses for GCP out on the Coursera website. That is where the Google Cloud team has elected to store training content and in the past those classes have been pretty good. I have enjoyed a ton of them in the past. That might be something that I want to invest more time in here shortly.

  • That ongoing narrative

    Understanding the intersection of technology and modernity takes time. My ongoing narrative related to digging into that intersection has spanned several years. I’m wondering if now would be a better time to try to move from some type of ongoing discourse about the intersection to try to put my thoughts into a short aside about it that could perhaps be expanded. One thing is for sure and that is that my focus needs to be directed toward something. Whoa —- I lost focus for a few moments. Something on the internet caught my attention for a second and pulled me right away from this weblog post. Alerts on a smartphone are a generally good idea, but during the execution of the concept the line for what is deemed worth of an alert has become very easy to cross.  

  • A very slow morning

    It feels like I’m taking the day off, but that is not happening on purpose. I’m not entirely awake at the moment. Sleep seems to be lingering today. Things related to the production of words are not moving along very swiftly today. I went to sleep a little bit earlier than usual last night and the consequence of so much sleep seems to be a very slow morning.

    Well —- the mystery of why things were off to such a slow start this morning was solved. I realized when I circled back for more coffee this morning that for some reason I had accidentally brewed myself 2 shots of decaffeinated espresso. Honestly, I had totally forgotten that any decaf espresso pods were in the cabinet. They tasted fine, but the outcome was disappointing in every way.

  • Daily writing habits

    Throughout the last 100 days I have been trying to fuel my daily writing habit by sitting down at the start of the day and writing a page of prose. Sometimes it worked well enough and other times it produced derivative writing about writing, but that happens from time to time. In the midst of being reflective sometimes that activity allows my attention to focus on the process of writing. For the most part daily writing helped establish my habit of waking up and writing. Without question the new puppy that arrived along the way was a great alarm clock. It created a lot of opportunity to work at very early hours of the day. I’m curious if 100 days in a row was enough to help establish the writing habit. I really do believe that writing on a daily basis is a good way to think out loud. The activity itself is all about thinking and actively questioning the world. You have to be reflective and question things with a deep skepticism before any degree of appreciation. 

    Moving forward I’m going to try to keep this writing streak going for as long as possible. You can go back and scroll across the time stamps for the last 100 days. These weblog posts arrived on time and are mostly during the very early hours of the day. The one thing that the daily writing habit exercised in the last 100 days was a bit of creativity, but no real strong narrative jumped out. I was not writing for any one cause or to press one agenda. For better or worse the prose is almost exclusively stream of consciousness based. I simply sat down at this custom built computer and typed. My thoughts at the start were mostly just a blank slate or purely tabula rasa. Everything else filled in along the way. Sometimes they did not fill in and the thoughts did not arrive on time. Earlier in the pandemic and quarantine that is pretty much where things stood. It was shocking and uncomfortable to the point that I simply did not want to actively write. You can imagine that at the time I was not even aware enough of the situation to be disappointed in my lack of journaling, writing, or just random note taking. 

    After writing for 100 days my voice has come back a little bit, but I’m not delivering a clear narrative that discusses the intersection of technology and modernity in excruciating detail. In fact, I’m barely scratching the surface of that analysis and that is entirely my fault. I could sit down and write out a short outline of where that line of thought should be going and work to fill in that outline one writing session at a time. That would not really replace this warm up exercise that happens every morning where I sit down and write for a while to get warmed up for the day. This is really just exercise for the mind, a sort of outward facing meditation of being present in the thoughts at the time. This forum where these words are now posted is just a functional journal not a chronicle of my life and times. I write about the things at the forefront of my thoughts at the very moment of the journaling. It is very functional in nature and not intended to be autobiographical or an ongoing personal narrative. Maybe that is a different use case for a weblog, but it has been clearly labeled since the start and it works for me. This is simply a place to put writing on things that are not entirely destined to be part of an academic article or a large piece of prose. This is the intellectual in between space where ideas or thoughts sit from time to time before moving on to some other project. 

    A 100-day publishing streak continues…

  • A block of attention

    All around us the air quality in Colorado has been impacted by several wildfires. Just walking outside the door makes everything smell like a campfire. Having lived in Colorado for over a decade, I have some basis for comparison to say that this is by far the longest period of this type of smoke filled horizon I have ever seen. The Waldo Canyon fire (2012) came and went much quicker than whatever is happening now. 

    Anyway… 

    One of the things that happened yesterday was that I spent a lot of time thinking about nonaligned manufacturing techniques within certain industries. Some markets are driven by similar goods with similar inputs, but some production output differences exist. Nothing really separates one output from another except quality and process. One example of this market condition seemed to stand out to me as highly irregular. I first focused on and thought about how some markets face conditions where the same initial goods being put into the product result in dramatically different outcomes for the producers. One such market is the American bourbon market. Some producers face extreme scarcity in the market with products that barely make it to the shelves and other products exist that are really good at taking up shelf space. A lot of other examples exist, but the American bourbon market is one where relatively similar inputs exist and the outcomes create extreme price stratification in the marketplace. Some outputs are worth 10x their relatively similar counterparts. I started to wonder if this was a failure of certain producers or a case of exceptulaism within the market. I wondered about the hypothesis, “How could some producers be so much better at the craft of making American bourbon than other producers?” All of that questioning centered around my thoughts on nonaligned manufacturing techniques within certain industries could create such different demand within the market. You would think that every producer would attempt to align to the highest possible outcome, but that does not appear to be the case. 

    Yeah I’m not sure why I spent so much time wondering about that yesterday, but that is what happened and it was a good old fashion pondering session. Obviously, I’m supposed to be spending my time thinking deeply about the intersection of technology and modernity. That was not really within that intersection based wheelhouse, but it was something that caught a block of my attention. Really deep and focused thought has to be at the forefront of the things I’m trying to actively achieve on a daily basis. Being able to focus on something with a relentless passion and focus is very important. Going all in to focus on one thing to conduct research and write is an important part of the process. Generally I have found that nibbling on concepts along the way does not produce meaningful results.

    A 99-day publishing streak continues…

  • Thinking about coding adventures

    Last night I spent some time working and thinking deeply about election engagement modeling to predict voting patterns. I’m hoping that later today the ideas in the pressure cooker of my thoughts will have evolved enough to be sharable on GitHub in the form of a Jupyter notebook. Most of the time I have thought out how I’m going to code or create something before I ever touch the keyboard. After it is all typed up and working, taking the next step of making the model shareable online in a repository will help set a date stamp to it and make it rather official. People have built some reliable and some very poor models for election prediction. It seems like now is as good as time to publicly throw my hat into the ring on this one. This notebook will include my first attempt to run a map driven model in a Jupyter notebook. That alone should be fun to figure out step by step how to load and model based on geographic data tables. Part of the fun of this exercise is learning a little more about how to use Jupyter notebooks and doing something that I would not normally spend my time doing. Right now having a few coding adventures is probably the right thing to do with my time. 

    Colorado has 4 major wildfires right now and the smoke from those fires has made the air quality in Denver questionable recently. You can see the statements about air quality on the official Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment website. The statements basically say that visibility and air quality have been impacted. Originally I had those previous sentences just hanging off the first paragraph. It took me a second to realize the topic had entirely changed and that a new paragraph was justified. I could probably continue to provide some supporting sentences or thoughts about the air quality right now, but you can imagine what a campfire smells like and extrapolate that to an entire region.

    Let’s jump back to the key topic at hand for the day. I’m going to start learning how to use GeoPandas and Geoplot (or maybe Matplotlib) to create some sweet visualizations. I’m going to start out small using a few different examples before working up to building out a 50 state electoral college prediction visualization. It seems like it would be a good skill (or at least a fun one) to have going forward. My goal for this effort is to drop some of these examples on GitHub along the way. I always try to walk step by step through the example to ensure that it can be repeatable and that it is easy for somebody to click from step one to the last step and understand what happened. This is great for both helping other people and creating repeatability within the research effort. Having really solid Jupyter notebook documentation reduces the barrier for replication within research and that is fundamentally a healthy direction to take within academic research. Somebody could easily adapt my methods and change the data or run it again with the same data to verify things happened and worked as expected. The one probably with this method is that everything in a Jupyter notebook is like a snapshot in time. Things will change within the dependencies and at some point the notebook will have errors and start failing on some deprecated functionality. That is one of those things that is the most frustrating part of working with coding. You have to constantly rework things that were done to keep them current. 

    A 98-day publishing streak continues