Source: Pixabay

I like the philosophy stating that writing is thinking and that to write clearly, one must think clearly. I do neither. I’m neither a good writer nor a good thinker. What I do, though, is think about the big picture and piece together seemingly unrelated threads into a reasonably cohesive structure that holds up to a bit of scrutiny. Maybe not a peer review, but that’s not why I write here. I write to process my thoughts and flesh those out, sometimes in real-time as I’m writing. It’s not the most scientific of methods, but it favours my type of neurological quirkiness, and, to be fair, the email newsletter format is not the best forum for that type of research. Without this outlet to write about the topics that frustrate me so much, I’d be pretty bored. Consequently, I try to make complex topics seem a little simpler without shying away from the details, with as many supporting links and examples as necessary. For the other stuff I like to write about, this year saw me start (restart?) a new personal blog where I can express other personal thoughts on things that are not on topic here.

With Carnaval over, it was back to some serious work. I had a fairly eclectic week with some training, presentations, writing, and relaxation.

I ran one of my AI courses this week to a small public of managers and business owners. These are interesting moments where I evaluate how the public perceives this technology. It doesn’t take long for the existential questions to creep into the discussion, as well as the whole debate about job loss. Remember, these are business owners looking for ways to optimise productivity and reduce overheads. I tend to calm those thoughts down by showing the limitations and outright crappy outputs generated by these calculators on steroids.

Carnaval, productivity and AI 🥴

Source: https://www.moderntiki.com/velvet-ti-punch/

Where I live, the week was dominated by Carnaval. It is one of two events that puts the entire island into a state of slowed-down activity. Most shops are closed from Sunday to Wednesday. A few essentials are open but generally limited to the mornings only. I’ve been a regular visitor to Carnaval over the years I’ve been living here, and I’ve documented through photography several times; however, this year, I decided to take advantage of the slow down by concentrating on some of the administrative work I needed to do … and a sneaky ti’punch now and again. 😉

A new contract

My week was a little more stressful than I would have liked or anticipated. I teach at three different institutions, and at one of them, I had a difficult situation to manage with one of the students. This put a lot of stress on me and affected me to the point where I was unhappy with the situation that evening. I didn’t sleep well that night, and it took a few days to wind down fully. However, there was a positive outcome that will help going forward. As a teacher, I’m just trying to make a small positive difference in the lives of those I teach genuinely and sincerely. I strive to do that whenever I’m in front of a class or a group of professionals I train. Perhaps I’m a bit naïve.

I got a bonus day… because I forgot something

I had a full week and week that brought some surprises and a great opportunity. We submitted our proposal to Stanford on time and just have to wait now. I started blogging about the project and how we came around to our question, the process and how we’re working together. You can read about it and follow along as (if) the project progresses here. This will be the central repository for any research work I do in the future, too.

This is my first newsletter of 2024, and it’s a long one. I look forward to writing more during the year. I won’t promise they will be sent on a strict schedule, but I’m setting an overall goal to get back into the rhythm of writing these long-form posts here and in newsletter form for this year’s subscribers list.

Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts by email or on Mastodon.

I’ve set up a new site to consolidate all the public writing I’ve been doing. I mentioned it before in the previous emails, but I’ll take the opportunity to plug my site again. I’ve added a page with what is essentially my CV to the site; the idea is to give people an easy one-stop shop to see what projects I have worked on over the last few years. The list isn’t exhaustive; it’s more representative.

I wanted to expand upon our thoughts on the research question for our proposal at the Stanford Internet Observation Center.

To recap, the research question is:

What key factors constrain the development of online safety skills in the Caribbean? Does uneven technology adoption in the Caribbean affect the vulnerability to online harms, what role does early education have in mitigating them, and do current multistakeholder collaboration initiatives have a significant effect?

Internet governance training and being spied on by Meta

I started a new training course from the Virtual School of Internet Governance this week. Over the next ten weeks, I’ll read, watch and learn more about the Internet and the structures and people behind its governance. I already know a fair amount, some of it from the fact that I was on the internet very early through a university account in London around ’89/’90. We didn’t have direct access, and I had to log in to JANET (Joint Academic Network), hop to NIST (?) and then on to the Internet that was still identified as ARPANET on some systems I was connecting to. I’m looking forward to this course and have already completed the first evaluation.

Following on from the announcement we made relating to the research proposal, the next bit of news is that we have submitted our final proposal.🙌🥳

Proposals of this type are actually more challenging to write than you think. They often come with constraints, and this one was no exception. We had only two pages of plain text in a traditional font like Times New Roman, at size 12. That turns out to be around 800 or so words. Not a lot to express your research in detail. So, it requires a decent amount of restraint and a lot of editing!