general

Today I learned that Dr Rodney James Crewther, known affectionately by colleagues and students as Rod, died last week. I only knew Rod through my education at the University of Adelaide in the late noughties, where he was a senior lecturer in the Physics department specialising in particle physics, but he had a huge impact on me. My thoughts are with those close to him in this difficult time. Rod truly cared about educating students.

Once a problem becomes moral, the acceptable solution space collapses. I'm reading Sylvia Nasar's book Grand Pursuit, and she talks about how Malthus' An Essay on the Principal of Population made the argument that as the poor classes gained more money they would always reproduce in greater numbers until they reached their previous state of poverty. This and other contemporary works of political economy posed these kinds of arguments as natural laws.

When all you've got is the hammer of mathematics, everything looks like an optimisation problem, you just need to choose the right objective function. So what should the objective function be for life? People today in general have much more means and much more freedom (i.e. fewer constraints in the solution space) than many of their ancestors, so what should we optimise? A study from Daniel Kahneman and the economist Angus Deaton says High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well being.

I recently convinced myself that I was right and a published paper was wrong. I did all the calculus by hand and decided they must have missed something. I resolved it by calculation. I played some very basic examples in my head and thought I was right, but I couldn't be sure. So I quickly implemented a concrete example case in Python using numpy. This helped me resolve pretty quickly that I was wrong; some searching produced a counterexample.

The Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) runs every two years to predict the shape of a protein, the building blocks of life, from its sequence of amino acids. We know the shape of a bunch (around 170,000) of proteins from techniques like X-ray crystallography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging, but it's a big experimental job to actually measure this. However we know the sequence of millions of proteins due to cheap DNA sequencing and the DNA to protein translation.

A lot of times I've failed by biting off more than I can chew. I get in over my head and lose motivation. A lot of times I've succeeded it's by starting small and slowly building up a roll of successes. When I was in highschool I tried to build a simulation of the solar system for a project. I wasn't satisfied with building ellipses, I wanted to take into account all the N-body interactions.

The Hawthorne effect is where when measuring the effect of lighting changes on worker output in an electrical factory any change increased output, even back to the original lighting conditions. I've heard this explained as running the experiment caused the employees to be observed more closely which led them to work harder, and used as a rationale for observing employees more. Except the Hawthorne effect is a myth. The economists Steven D.

Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be fierce and original in your works. Gustave Flaubert, To Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876) It's hard to find the energy and focus to be creative when your life is a mess. Before you can be productive you need to sleep well, eat well, exercise well and have good routines and social supports. See here for more on the origin of this quote.

I'm terrible at remembering names. When someone introduces themselves I'm normally a bit anxious and in my own head and don't take in their name. It takes conscious effort to remember their name, let alone the names of their family or facts about them. However remembering things about people are really important for building relationships. If you take an interest in other people's lives they will be more receptive to you.

There's a common misconception that the best way to get promoted is to excel in your current role. However doing too well in your current role can get you stuck. The actual best way is to grow and start practising the skills for the next role. A friend of mine worked as a night filler at a supermarket, stocking shelves. He worked hard to be one of the best fillers and work his way up.

I like to think of myself as an egalitarian, but I know I have implicit bias. I've done some tests on Project Implicit and have roughly the implicit biases you would expect for my demographic. This makes me feel a bit sad, but you can't really control your implicit biases, they're a function of your environment and perception growing up. The key question is given that we have implicit biases how do we act against them?

Counting is a strangely powerful tool for enduring through something. Standard advice when you're angry is to count to ten. When stretching counting to a target number helps sustain the stretch longer. A good counting based technique for endurance is box breathing. It involves repeatedly inhaling to a count of 4, holding to a count of 4, exhaling to a count of 4 and holding to a count of 4. This is a technique used by Navy SEALs to induce calm and focus.

When I say something that is hard to hear I say it in a complex way. As if saying it in a hard to understand way will soften the blow. But it just muddies the message and causes confusion. Instead of saying "I don't want the soup", I say something like "It's not that I don't like your soup; I just don't feel like it right now. I mean it's not my favourite soup and I wouldn't be unhappy having it.

My 5 year old OnePlus One's power button has finally worn out, to the point where I can't press it. I panicked when the battery ran out - I was afraid I wouldn't be able to power it back on. However I found a video demonstrating how to turn it on with a power cable and the volume button. Pressing the volume down button when you attach the power cable to a computer puts it into recovery mode and you can boot it from there.

I love having a clean desk and empty inbox. But I hate spending the time cleaning my desk and processing emails. It feels like wasted time where I could do something better. However having "tidy time" to maintain things is important. A while ago I read David Allen's Getting Things Done. When I tried to implement it I got stuck on the notion of a weekly review. Setting aside some time every week to see how you're progressing on tasks and to process any new tasks.

It's worthwhile spending some time thinking about how you spend your time. Time and energy are among your most valuable resources. A regular investment of time can build into substantial assets, but if you don't budget time it's easily misspent. I don't believe that you should allocate away all of your time, but setting some time constraints is important. If you don't put the big rocks of things that are important to you first in the jar first, all the sand and water of mundane things will fill it up.

Today I saw a picture in someone's windows "Always Exceed Everyone's Expectations". My initial reaction was that was a quick way to burnout - trying to always exceed expectations sounds like running on a treadmill that gets faster and faster. But another way to look at it is to set lower expectations and only commit when you can confidently deliver. In another expression "under-promise and over-deliver". Consistently delivering what you promise to customers is the way to build trust and loyalty.

As a data analyst I rely on open code and open data to inform decisions. There's a lot of data available on the web which would be great to transform and make openly available to the community. However it's not my data to give, and I'm concerned whether it would violate copyright. An interesting aspect is there are companies that scrape data from all over the web to use for analysis.

There are always more things you can be doing than the time you have. If you try to do everything you will end up accomplishing nothing. It can be hard to say "no" to someone, but it's important in order to focus on your priorities. I find it useful to have priorities and goals to set a direction. Often the actual choice of goals doesn't matter as much as that I make them, and regularly review them.

Some websites, like this one, have a lot of content but have no search function. Others have search but it performs poorly, for example Bunnings has great category pages but the search never hits it. Fortunately there's a simple way to search these sites with the site: search operator. If I want to search for articles about jobs just in this website I can type: site:skeptric.com job into either Google or Bing.

My friend has four different magnets for plumbers on his fridge. Three of them are generic rectangular magnets that have generic information and contact details. One of them was in the shape of a dripping tap, mentioning they were experts in leaks and drips. If they had a leaking faucet it's pretty easy to guess which plumber they would call; the specialists in dripping taps. On the other hand if they had a clogged toilet it's down to chance which of the plumbers they would call, although they're less likely to call the dripping tap specialist they're also more likely to forget to look at the fridge and just search for a plumber online.

In the 90s Microsoft famously used a strategy of embracing other protocols, then adding extensions to their implementation until it's no longer compatible and utilising their market leverage to extinguish competing implementations. While "EEE" is normally associated with Microsoft many of the software titans use it as an effective strategy to further their existing dominance into new markets. Embracing a technology with an existing market is an effective way to quickly gain adoption.

The University of Adelaide, being a sandstone Group of Eight University, has the archaic ceremony of a mace-bearer leading the processing carrying a heavy piece of expensive metal. When I graduated with my Bachelor of Science I was fortunate enough to be that mace-bearer. Unfortunately I wasn't really prepared for the formality. The ceremony was on a typical Adelaide summer's day, hot and dry. I was going out to lunch with my parents afterwards, so I wanted to make sure I was comfortable.

When I don't have clear goals, I'm more likely to spread myself too thin. It's easy to get in a reactive mode, where I say "yes" to anything that comes on my plate. But that means I don't have the time to focus on the important things and am jumping from task to task. It takes time to set goals and priorities, but when I don't take that time I end up spending much more time on busywork.

For any actionable item there are four ways to handle it: do it, defer it, delegate it or delete it. Delegation is an often overlooked powerful option to handle things. It's not just for high powered executives to delegate down to their personal assistants; even if you don't have any reports it's possible to delegate. You can delegate in three directions: down, sideways and up. Downwards delegation is the classic kind that comes to most people's minds.

One of the most important abilities of an analyst is to be able to check your work. It's really easy to get incorrect data, have issues in data processing, or even misunderstand what the output means. But if your work is valuable enough to change a decision it's worth doing whatever you can to check it's right. When you get to the end of a long analysis it seems like a time to relax and be glad the hard work is over.

A friend needed to generate a hundred contracts and their HR information system wasn't working properly. I helped them implement a workaround solution by using mail merge to generate a PDF for every contract, which saved them a lot of time filling in the details of each contract. I couldn't automatically generate the PDF despite some efforts, but using mail merge was much quicker and more reliable than filling in all the contract details manually into the template.

My first professional job was for Haese mathematics which is a small family-owned South Australian business that writes and publishes mathematics textbooks. Working for a small company was a really interesting experience, I learned software development for their applications both for students and teachers, made animations, edited audio and did layout and graphic design of the books. Unfortunately I didn't make the effort to learn much about the business itself, which makes me wonder how big the market is for mathematics textbooks.

Placing options on a scatterplot of costs versus benefits is a common practice for prioritising opportunities and solutions. The primary benefit of this approach is it can spark discussions. When people see the options on the canvas they it can help uncover unseen issues and opportunities. Getting a group of people involved in putting it together can help get them on the same page. The primary risk of this approach is getting too precise about it.

Today I was picking grapes from their vine for my partner's grandmother. They had been left too long and many were rotting or had bright blue spots where some form of fungus or algae was growing on them. I sorted the grapes into piles of rotten grapes and edible grapes. When I picked a big bunch of grapes with a couple of rotting overripe grapes I sorted it into the rotten pile, despite there being a dozen ripe looking grapes.