Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

First draft of lab meeting post 18 feb 21 #103

Open
wants to merge 1 commit into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from
Open

First draft of lab meeting post 18 feb 21 #103

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
83 changes: 83 additions & 0 deletions _posts/blog/2021-02-18-lab-meeting.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
# Lab Meeting on 18th February 2021

This is the second week of our new lab meeting schedule. We are getting very busy with giving talks, making progress with our projects, and peer mentoring sessions have begun.

The theme of our lab meeting this week was 'cool or useful tools and apps for working or general life'. We had some presentations and demonstrations from **Sophia, Emma** and **Arielle**. This included a demo by Sophia about her exciting work with [OpenMined](https://www.openmined.org/). OpenMined is an open-source community whose goal is to make a world more privacy-preserving by lowering the barrier-to-entry to private AI tecnologies.

Insert video here from OpenMined website : https://youtu.be/-b0CQFr6xyA


**Sophia** showed us some software she has been working on called OpenMined's Duet. OpenMined is a very active open source community with over 10,000 contributors. The main focus of this community is privacy preserving technology to support the analysis of sensitive data.She demonstrated PySyft in which you can submit scripts for data analysis on data that you cannot see.

We all found this approach very interesting and **Kirstie** suggested that we have a longer session on this to get a more indepth insight.

**Sophia** also gave us a quick demo of [Tweetdeck](https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/), which can be used to organise yout twitter accounts, sechedule tweets and also importantly has a confirmation step that can e sued to stop you tweeting from the wrong account.

**Emma** pointed us towards some resources that are useful for academic article writing. First up was [connected papers](https://www.connectedpapers.com/) that can visually help you find and explore papers relevant to their field of work. In the graph produced, papers are arranged based on their similarities in co-citation and bibliographic coupling. Emma suggested that this could be used for finding references on a new research topic or checking that you have found all the relevant papers needed to write an article.

Also, suggested by **Emma** was [Academic phrasebank](http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/) that is one for new article writers! It has a bank of useful sentences for different aspects of scientific paper writing. A good place to start if you are stuck with the language used for writing academic papers.

**Kirstie** suggested a resource, inspired by Emma's examples, that is great for finding papers similar to one you're reading. REALLY good for finding reviewers for submitted abstracts as well! https://jane.biosemantics.org/index.php

**Arielle** showed us [Todoist](https://todoist.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAvbiBBhD-ARIsAGM48bzET1UO1fCtjmBvkRMglyTqJYLKXYcOy89w2n2gsxExxRumDyX8UtIaAhflEALw_wcB) as a really helpful app to combine all your todo lists! We only wish we could all be as organised as Arielle and now we know her secret! :clipboard:

# Celebrations and cool things to share

**Kirstie** attended the [Engage@Turing Doctoral Showcase](https://www.turing.ac.uk/engageturing-students), on Friday 19th February, along with other members of the lab. This enrichment scheme for doctoral students was set up to offer the opportunity to access training and form connections with the Turing research network remotely. The showcase gave Kirstie and others an insight into their research and particularly how their projects might be of interest to our TPS programme. Kirstie will be inviting some of the students to join us at future TPS coffee chats so we can find out more.:rocket:

**Kirstie** is also loving seeing the peer mentoring sessions begin and wants to thank all lab members that have already had meetings. :heart_eyes_cat:

**Sophia** has been helping a graduate student with some code to help his data analysis. This means she has been able to screen 4000 abstracts as part of a systematic review! She commented that "It's cool to be able to help someone shift towards reproducibility" :muscle:

**Laura** has rewritten an article that got desk rejected last time she submitted it and it has now been accepted and sent out for review. She has also fixed her radiator in her work room. So made a lot of progress on multiple fronts this week. :stars:

**Isla** has shared a documentary series she has been watching by Adam Curtis called "Can't Get You Out of MY Head". It tackles some interesting history conspiracy theories, the history of shaping data into a picture of the world that you already believe in, the inability of the western world to come to terms with the exploitation that brought it to power (and is still in many ways [ongoing](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/mars-nestle-and-hershey-to-face-landmark-child-slavery-lawsuit-in-us)) and the confusing state of power in the world today. She commented that "I don't agree with 100% of his conclusions, but i think it is a lot of interesting food for thought". :film_projector:

**Emma** has been working on a number of different presentations that she has got coming up in the next few weeks, including an introduction to *The Turing Way* at the Software sustainability Insitute ['Boost your research reproducibility with Binder' workshop](https://www.software.ac.uk/RSCamp-research-accessibility) that is being organised by fellow lab member Sarah. This is being made much easier by the open sharing of previous Turing Way talks by Community members so a big thumbs up to open ways of working :thumbsup:. **Emma** is preparing speaking notes as well as slides - **Malvika** offered a top tip about this - she uses otter to take notes for her at first and then she edits them. This is a great suggestion! :star:

**Arielle** has been organising the next [Tools, Practices and Systems Seminar](https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/tools-practices-systems-monthly-meet) that features speakers from the Netherlands eScience Center. It is going to be held on Wednesday 24th February between 12:30 and 14:00pm GMT, so please come along to that or the next seminar in April. :loudspeaker:


**Georgia** is excited to be getting support with her project from a government team she used to work with at GDS. Their code is open and accessible and will hopefully be a good fit. Here a [link](https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/) to the super user-tested components that are open and reusable. :hugging_face:

**Maria** has been spending her time cleaning databases and scripts, and getting everything organised for the paper she is writing. She had her first mentoring sessions with Emma nad Ismael, which she though were lovely. :hibiscus: She has also been attending loads of talks and seminars, which worthwhile but eating up a lot of her time.

**Malvika** has now got a very full calendar! :grin: She reports it was all nice an breezy until the first week of February and now she has many things to keep her occupied. She had few more talks to give this week and also some coming up in the next few weeks. She is starting to organised the next *Turing Way* Book Dash. She has all the resources in place but needs to decide a date in May (April seems too fast!), which will beautifully align with the plan for 'OLS for Turing' folks contributing to *The Turing Way*. :broccoli:


# Questions we're thinking about

**Laura wanted to know - what is your favourite way of explaining how big a petabyte of data is (or an exabyte, or zettabyte, if that's easier)?** Currently she uses the example of "2,000 years of MP3 music" but that feels a bit dated now :older_woman:

**Emma** suggested using number of Netflix downloads to bring it right up to date and **Sophia** added the fact - "we produced about 44 zettabytes of data last year. One single zettabyte is the equivalent of 1 billion terabyte drives". Patricia added that CERN always translates it into physical storage media, so basically a high pile of CDs from the earth to the moon or something like that.


**Arielle** started a discussion about the word **'solidarity'** and what this word means to you? How do you feel it applies in your work? or does it apply in your work? **Ismael** imagines it applies to some jobs specifically but always applies to how we conduct ourselves whilst working. For example, one would *hope* nurses and doctors do their jobs "with solidarity" *by the nature of the job*. Conversely, solidarity in a payroll manager might be a very costly thing. He would add that, both the solidarity of individuals and that of jobs are a case of degree -- degrees of solidarity in individuals vs. degrees of solidarity in jobs.

**Laura** added "for me quite a lot of the idea of solidarity is expressed in this quote from an Aboriginal Rights group: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." I don't think I'm doing a wonderful job of applying that to my PhD project though".

**Kirstie** commented that "Up until striking with UCU in 2018 I originally felt super awkward about using the word "solidarity" - I have this feeling that it is something that "serious" "activists" do. Then I stood in the snow and lost a bunch of pay and felt like I was probably sufficiently serious to count in the group. NOW I think that the work just means standing with someone. It might mean helping them, it might mean just witnessing their challenges and successes. It doesn't mean trying to fix their individual situation but aligning to remove structural barriers".

**Kirstie asked "What are the 2-3 core values that someone (other than you) would need to thrive and really shine in your job?**"
* **Maria** thought initiative, adaptability and perserverance are needed to just do the job but collaboration, openness, resourcefulness and service are values that allow you to thrive. Also kindness just makes everything better.
* **Patricia** thinks collaboration, openness and agility/flexibility are important.
* **Laura** would pick resilience, initiative, and perspective.
* **Arielle** went for diligence, collaboration, initiative as a minimum for my role, but it could be enhanced by openness, integrity (similar to diligence I think), perserverance...
* **Ismael** chose integrity, creativity and openness.
* **Sophia** picked resilience, tolerance, and faith. Because sticking to your guns is only as effective (in the current environment) if it's done gently.
* **Malvika** could not pick only three so went for community, commitment, diversity, openness, and reliability.

**Kirstie** pointed out that initative, adaptability and perseverance are the things really needed for completion of a PhD.

Here's a word cloud of this discussion on core values for our jobs:

![](https://i.imgur.com/xvG5dTs.png)



**Cooking questions also important**
As the UK is currently in lockdown, we are all spending more time perfecting our cooking skills, especially **Malvika** who has been refining her homemade pasta making and any other foodstuffs that can contain cheese and spinach. :spaghetti:

This weeks culinary dilemma was 'Is risotto better with butternut and sage or pea and feta?':rice:

Most of us went for the former but here are recipes for both if you fancy trying them: [Butternut and sage risotto](https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/butternut-squash-sage-risotto) and [Pea and feta risotto](https://www.abelandcole.co.uk/recipes/garden-pea-feta-risotto).