Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Education

  • Getting into the swing of coding again

    I opened my first issue on GitHub. The author responded to it, which was exciting. It’s distinctly possible that I’m going to fork that repository to have it do something a little bit different than what the author intended. My fork would be a depreciation of some pop up functionality to make the overall plugin easier to use for people who were just wanting to engage some direct links to other pages. One of the things that I’m seriously considering is just setting up a backlog and keeping interaction notes for my efforts. 

    That made me wonder if GitHub kept a native backlog feature. Based on my initial searching it does not appear that GitHub has such a thing. My primary writing backlog is something that I keep in a Google Doc at the end of the document. Functionally, I work on one unit of writing a week so having a backlog of 5 items in planning and review and then tons of uncommitted items is not a very big deal. Working on a coding project is a different type of effort compared to that one unit a week writing project. I’m going to need a better way to manage my backlog or I’m not going to ever get to code complete as a single developer on the project. 

    My current plan is that every day I’m going to try to spend an hour dedicated to building code either right before or after dinner. I have some detailed sketches of what needs to be built out and I’m working on building and coding it live in production. Some of the bigger elements of the project are probably going to need several hours of attention at one time to get set up. That will need to be a weekend activity to be sure. On the brighter side of things only a few of those types of large efforts exist.

    I broke out the extra large notepad and started some sketches. My process is a little different from most people. All of the concepts and ideas normally get crunched in my head first and then I draw out the slides or the graphic after that process completes. It’s not an iterative sketching process when I build things out. The thing has been brought into existence before I try to memorialize it with a graphic.

  • Online gardens of paywalled content

    Writing random missives on Twitter generates more views than a blog post gets at the moment. It is not even close in terms of a comparison. I just got done looking at the data and it made me wonder a little bit about the nature of the open internet. A lot of walled off gardens exist where people go to engage and are a user of the platform. Sometimes parts of the internet get extended to those gardens, but it is becoming more and more a garden of paywalled content. More and more publications that write stories either within the world of entertainment, information, or news open the door to a few free stories and then try to get users to cross over into the paywalled version of things. It’s a world of online gardens of paywalled content that is fundamentally different from a bunch of content being interconnected by really simple syndication (RSS) feeds. 

    This blog for example has a large bulk of content from before 2014 that is set to private. Even my collection of online missives housed in this blog format has a section that is essentially paywalled. That wall has been built for an audience of one, but that does not make it anymore real as a segmentation against the open internet. That is perhaps the point I’m getting around to as we round out the second paragraph of this thought. Building out a functional search engine for the open internet seems like something that might be a good use of my time. Instead of focusing on all the online gardens of paywalled content that users cannot really access without being a subscriber of those services it might be easier to just help people get to other sources of content. Right now the picture I have in my mind is of delivering two sets of results from curated sets of sources while denoting that one list is essentially paywalled and the other is fundamentally not. 

    You might be asking yourself if that is essentially my effort at building a really large RSS feed reader that is curated. I think that might very well be what I’m talking about. Building out my own personal really large RSS feed portal is probably a project that I could knock out this summer. Adding the searchable component to it would be a pretty lightweight extension. Overall the value inherent to the project would be my personal curation of the content. That would not be easily replicated as it is essentially a personally tailored news feed with some search extensibility. I may go look to see if I have a parked domain that could be used to house this project.

  • I’m still learning how to get LaTeX to work on Overleaf

    My energy and efforts have been focused on producing high quality academic content since July 21. Instead of blogging away I focused on that introduction to machine learning syllabus I have been preparing. I’m even doing the typesetting in LaTeX using the Overleaf website in preparation to be a better academic. It seemed like a good idea to learn how to publish academic papers using LaTeX. Generally, I have been able to get away with using Microsoft Word to prepare things or sometimes Google Docs. It seems the world has changed and the serious people writing serious papers are all using LaTeX these days. It took me about an hour, maybe two hours to start getting the hang of it and I don’t really like it at all. It’s a clumsy method for typesetting and while I get that the focus is on the end product and how it looks as a PDF the actual process of typesetting is tedious. My basis of comparison is that I can very easily write in APA formatting in Microsoft Word and work from start to finish on a document. It’s fine really as a platform for documenting words and processing them. I get that the idea of LaTeX and the storage of documents in PDF format is to ensure that the documents are portable and readable for as long as possible. Anyway, I’m still learning how to get LaTeX to work on Overleaf. I have the first 3 parts of that syllabus loaded up and I’ll get adding part by part until all 8 are loaded. I’ll give it a really good proofreading and then try to submit it for preprint. That is the plan anyway.

  • Latest paper research notes

    Over the last few days, I have been looking at sketches of the healthcare landscape in the United States. My research is strictly limited to that universe of care at the moment. Maybe later I could do some comparative analysis, but at the moment a limited universe is necessary to make progress on this initial research effort. I have a very large Moleskine sketchbook that has A3 size pages. Which for those of you who do not know happens to be 11.75 inches by 16.5 inches. That gives me plenty of space to sketch out ideas. At the moment, I have been working on three different sketches that will be converted from sketch to slide at some point. That effort includes mapping the healthcare space, plotting the next 5 years, and a sketch of where ML will be in that 5 year mapping of healthcare. My initial analysis showed a bunch of different ways to look at things. It feels like the overall ecosystem is being pushed from a lot of directions instead of being driven organically into a cohesive mesh.

  • Horizons vs. edges

    Today could be a day of deep focus on things just down the road a little bit. Pondering that perfect possible future is always near the edge of my thoughts, but today for some reason I’m not trying to look just past the edge of what is possible. At the moment, I’m just looking at the horizon and my focus is not just beyond it at the moment. Maybe my two shots of Nespresso have not kicked all the way in or it is going to be one of those days where questions outpace whimsy. Anyway that pretty much sums up where my thoughts are at the moment. My talks as a speaker are generally lined up for the year. I’m doing weekly research for The Lindahl Letter into machine learning and at some point I’m going to spend some time working on traditional academic papers. 

    One of the deeper questions about my academic trajectory has been about really focusing on churning out academic papers and putting all of my focus on that path toward journal articles or continuing down the more general road of writing. It’s a real conundrum and for the most part I have let the wind take me in the direction of my greatest interest for the last 10 years. That direction has been toward the path of doing and being closer to the pracademic side of things than the traditional academic way of muddling through. Now that my experiences are stacking up in a positive direction it might be time to work on that balance and figure out somewhere in the middle to exist. From everything I can tell right now the academic world is facing a real overwhelming supply surge in content creation that is not resulting in the type of synthesis that translates and summarizes the overall fields. Driving complexity into specializations has made the depth part of the equation so overwhelming that any attempt at pure breath in a field fails for one person to handle.

  • Thinking about writing and research

    Well my testing of the Twitter thread creation feature in WordPress has gone well enough. I have used it for the last couple of days and the results were successful, but not in any way inspiring. The linking method they use to bring links from the post over to Twitter is wonky. They mechanically extract the link and share it explicitly within parentheses after the original spot where it occurred. So it looks sort of out of place based on the way people share links in a modern embedded way on the internet. It’s an odd style choice, but then again Twitter itself is a forced minimum in a world of excess and overcommunication. Even the new expanded Tweet limit of 280 characters just allows a couple of sentences to be created at a time. You can elect to communicate within that shortened utterance window, but it is not really how I prefer to exchange my thoughts and ideas.

    My preference is to engage in a more long form exchange of the written word. That is probably why writing academic articles and weblog posts is where I spend a lot of my time. For the most part either way you are granted the chance to put your thoughts, arguments, opinions, or logic down on the page for better or worse. Sure in the academic writing space you can face delays and rounds of revisions, but that is the nature of things so ingrained in the academy that it took an entirely new method of online pre-print sharing to shatter. That happened due to the fact that people want to openly exchange academic information and learn and develop rapidly in certain segments of the academy. That need to exchange and work toward common frameworks and applications of developing technology required a faster cycle of information exchange. Generally in the machine learning space, artificial intelligence domain, and other sciences it seems that publication in arXiv has been working for people. It is a far less gated way to get your words out into the open vs. waiting for the academic review process of some journals that take an awfully long time to evaluate content. 

    A lot of research seems to be starting to form around the way pre-print sharing is changing the very nature of publishing in journals. I’ll provide more coverage of that later when I find an article worth sharing that concisely explains the current situation. That is probably a problem for more than one cup of coffee to solve. I’m only partially into my first cup of coffee and it is only slightly warm at the moment. Microwaving that cup of coffee seems like a lot of work at the moment. I’ll probably muddle on through creating the rest of this page of prose before going to work on the coffee problem. My initial goal for the day was to sit down and write a full page before switching over to editing and finishing the next installment of The Lindahl Letter for Friday, April 30, 2021. During the course of designing the trajectory of that writing effort 37 weeks were mapped out and content was drafted, reworked, and established for the first 14 weeks of publication. As of next Friday we will have traveled to the end of my generally drafted efforts. Starting in week 15 will be entering a new phase of publication on Friday and new content creation for the next week starting on Saturday. It will basically be a weekly content creation and publishing cycle going forward.

    It is entirely possible that a flourish of creativity will occur and enough content will be drafted to work ahead again, but that does not appear to be the case the moment. Things seem to be lining up to a weekly content creation cycle. That is not a bad path forward, but it requires a lot more consistency in weekly writing than being weeks ahead of the point of publication. Generally the amount of tinkering and rework is about to decrease.

  • Reading a journal double issue

    A pretty big double journal issue from the American Review of Public Administration (ARPA) showed up in the mailbox this week. It contains 808 pages of journal articles about Covid-19 from a public administration perspective. I’m going to spend the weekend reading this double issue and thinking about why each of these articles was written. I’m going to deconstruct them from the perspective of why they were put together and why each specific article was assembled. I’m really curious about why the author structured it and published it in the way it ended up on the page for readers.

  • Intellectual flooding (papers)

    On a Monday of all days, I started to dig in and focus my academic ambitions to a very specific line of inquiry related to really flushing out the trajectories in a myriad of machine learning literature reviews. I’m walking down the path to understanding a review of reviews of sorts. That inquiry is not very targeted and the content I’m going to encounter will be more of a breath based search of machine learning knowledge. After working through that tower of academic contribution I plan to spend some type really digging into the depth of a couple of key items to form a new academic trajectory toward some survey work or coding efforts that would yield additional academic contributions on my part. 

    At this point in time, I need to refocus my efforts and spend time really digging into the current stream of academic contributions. That will help me rebalance my efforts to be a mix of both productive research projects and steady inquiry into how the broader academic of academic thought is changing. Given the sheer volume of publications that are occurring right now that becomes even more challenging. That is why I elected to focus on only reading literature reviews to start. I felt that a review of reviews would help me target the core articles being referenced commonly within the reviews and help me look at what outliers the various academics found to be important. 

    Today I’m going to spend more time reading those papers that were identified yesterday. It was very overly ambitious to think that I could read and digest 2-3 literature reviews per day. That is an expectation from back when all I had to do in a given day was academic efforts. Within the limited windows of a full day of adulting the ability to consume 30 pages of a journal article simply takes more time. That is the nature of things I guess as we move forward into this study of machine learning. I’m going to move along at the best speed possible and focus on making quality contributions to the academy of academic thoughts. At this point in time, trying to just spew out content is a fool’s errand to deliver errata destined for a historically dusty shelf at the academy.

  • 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. 

  • Day 3 of the Ai4 2020 conference

    The content from today was partially pulled together from notes taken throughout yesterday. Writing and adapting from notes is sometimes a little easier than tackling the blank page. That was the case today.  

    I’m going to mess around with the H2O.ai product stack later today or maybe this weekend. After watching Sri Ambati talk about democratizing AI yesterday I’m curious about the inference engine they have built out. One of the things that I learned is that I want to spend more time learning about adversarial model testing. 

    During the course of the day yesterday I spent about 15 minutes just unsubscribing to emails that I never asked to get in the first place. They just show up in waves full of advertising nonsense. 

    One of the things that I realized yesterday during the course of listening to my own pre-recorded session was that it is sort of weird. You cannot change anything along the way. You are locked in while you listen to your own words with an audience of other people. Those other people are pretty much just listening along as well. It is sort of strange to just sit in the chat session during that whole process and be ready to just answer questions along the way. It was less stressful and gave me a better chance to answer questions in real time. 

    During the second day of the 2020 Ai4 digital conference I attended a few sessions. Here is the list of those sessions:

    • General Session Keynotes
    • At some point later, I want to watch the replay of, “The Fight for Fairness and Transparency in AI,” session 
    • A Comprehensive Guide to MLOps. Planning for the New Normal in a Time of COVID
    • I attended my own session that was billed as “Figuring out applied ML: Building frameworks and teams to operationalize ML at scale” which was really my “Applied ML ROI – Understanding ML ROI from different approaches at scale” talk
    • AI Learning & Development Panel
    • I’m going to try to watch, “Data at REST? Unlocking Data from REST APIs,” later. I missed it this time around.
    • Ethical AI Digital Assistants

    During the third day of the 2020 Ai4 digital conference I’m going to probably get to listen to fewer sessions, but it has been fun so far.